BLONDEL Jacques

Jacques Blondel is Director of Research Emeritus CNRS at Centre d'Écologie Fonctionnelle et Évolutive (CEFE) de Montpellier... Since the beginning of his career, he has been interested in the mechanisms of regulating biological diversity in space and time, and has developed a nested approach to research on the scale of fauna, species assemblages and populations, using the Mediterranean area as a field of investigation and birds as a study model. The remarkable heterogeneity of Mediterranean landscapes has led him to analyse in detail the mechanisms of adaptation to habitat diversity, developing within the research team he has created integrated approaches combining demography, genetics, evolutionary ecophysiology and ethology. In particular, he focused on the respective roles of phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation by microevolution in the analysis of responses to selection regimes induced by different habitat conditions as well as by several components of global change. Author of nearly 350 articles and 7 books, he has also been involved in current issues related to biodiversity (he was president of the Conseil Scientifique de l’Institut Français de la Biodiversité) and relations between humans and non-humans, which he developed in a book L'archipel de la Vie, an essay on biological diversity and an ethics of its practice (Buchet-Chastel, 2012).