Know more

Lakes are habitats for diverse species including endemic taxa, and are valuable resources that provide humanity with many ecosystem services (Figure 1). CARRTEL Limnological Center assesses the biological diversity, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem functions and related dangers caused by human activities threatening large lake ecosystems and aims to evaluating pathways of sustainable development that are more respectful of their ongoing provision of services. Visit our Research Axes and Ongoing Projects. 

Lake ecosystem functioning & services:

Figure 1 : Overview of services provided by large lakes, of most known stressors, and of the impacts of these stressors on lakes. White arrows highlight direct or indirect impacts on the lake food web.

 CARRTEL aims to explore:

• The diversity of biological assemblages and their turn-over and responses to pressures (including prokaryotic microorganisms including cyanobacteria, and eukaryotes including fungal viruses), with an ability to study all functional groups (primary producer , invertebrate and vertebrate consumers, parasites, saprotrophs ...) to move towards a vision as complete as possible of food webs.
• The ecological processes and functions in interaction with biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles as well as biotic interactions and their roles in the functions of production and transformation of elements and organic matter, e.g. carbon cycle, biodiversity-pollutants.
• The responses from different levels of biodiversity (intra-specific to trophic / ecological networks) to anthropogenic and climatic forcings, evaluation of ecological states from various biological groups and metrics, and current level of biotic homogenization and past (including genetic, phylogenetic diversity) under forcings.

Research axes