Scientist with CIRAD (French research institute specialized in development-oriented research for the tropics), Forests & Societies unit
Stationed abroad at Institut National Polytechnique félix Houphouët Boigny (INPHB), Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast
Contact
Electronicbruno.herault (at) cirad.frPostalINPHB, Institut National Polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny, BP 1093, Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast Voice+225 (0) 1 63 79 77 |
Research Interests
I am a tropical forest scientist. I have wide research interests, but my current research focused on the effects of global changes (both climate-driven and land-use changes) on the structure, dynamics, composition, functioning of tropical forests as well as on the induced consequences on the ecosystem services they actually provide to humanity.
Modelling the Dynamics of Tropical Forests
| An important objective in tropical forest science is to understand
how biological traits determine species performance and species sorting
across environmental gradients. We work on Bayesian modelling approaches
predicting tropical tree vital rates from traits, both hard- and soft-,
and including ontogenetic variation in tropical tree performance.
Developing general trait-based dynamic models is especially important
for diverse tropical forests where many species occur in densities too
low to parametrize species-specific dynamic models. In doing so, we
hope to bridge the gap between individual-based and community-level
statistical models with little parameter inflation.
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Impact of Climate Changes on Rainforests
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Climate changes are expected to continue all over the world. Below
the tropics, temperatures are expected to rise while dry periods and
extreme rain events are expected to be stronger and longer. As we
already identified some climate variables as key drivers of tropical
forest dynamics, we are now using forest simulators to explore the
forest trajectory over the next coming decades under different climate
scenarios. Climate-driven processes observed at the tree scale are not
directly transposable at the community level because of factors such as
compensatory effects between demographic processes (growth, mortality)
or non-linear response with ontogeny. We are therefore working to scale
our models to be able to go beyond the analytical studies of our current
semi-empirical models.
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Quantitative modelling of land-use change trajectories
| Modelling deforestation to identify the main socio-economic and
biophysical drivers of land-use change is a complex and
multidisciplinary field, involving economic issues as well as
geographical tools and environmental sciences. Until the late 90’s,
non-spatially explicit models of deforestation were more common than
models integrating spatial variables in their framework even if the
deforestation process is a fully spatial process. The development of
more and more powerful computers, associated to the widespread uses of
Geographic Information Systems and to available land cover data from
satellite images, have democratized deforestation models taking into
account spatial factors. We work on modelling framework for building
spatially explicit models of deforestation upon a radical distinction
between purely geographic factors influencing the spatial contagion and
socio-economic factors influencing the process intensity. |
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Looking for optimal sustainable development trajectories
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Predicting the impacts of various global change scenarios of both
climate and land-use changes changes on biodiversity, other ecosystem
services (carbon stocks, water resources) as well as on economical goods
productions of the various tropical forest ecosystems is of primary importance to inform policy makers. Modeling
the future of forest-derived goods and services under different
scenarios, we aim to provide optimal development trajectories, key
areas for conservation, guidelines for sustainable resource uses as well as priority efforts to be made for forest
ecosystem restoration.
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