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Some finalized outputs of ECOSYS research contribute to the assessment of ecosystem services provided by agroecosystems. Thus, the concept of ecosystem services constitutes a conceptual framework for the organization and valuation of the final research. This concept especially concerns: production of food biomass and renewable carbon ("production" service), recovery of organic waste and recycling of organic matter and nutrients in organic waste ("recycling" service), maintenance of biodiversity reservoir ("biodiversity" service), regulation of global climate ("climate" service) and finally regulation of biosphere compartments quality (“filtering” service).

One of the core activities focuses on environmental assessment and human exposure to various contaminants. Agroecosystems, particularly in the peri-urban context, are our main subject of study. On the one hand, we seek to consider the agricultural practices and their evolution, particularly in an agro-ecological transition framework, or environmental conditions evolution related to climate change. This may lead us to reconsider our tools to be able to evaluate all practices (presence of crop residues on soil surface, catch crops, intra-field heterogeneity due to mixture of crop species, etc.) and to test their validity under various soil and climate conditions. On the other hand, we seek, as far as possible, to develop tools integrating a diversity of ecosystems at the landscape scale (e.g. various types of crop, hedges/woods in atmospheric dispersion models) and describing all relevant processes in the different compartments.

The main participants are : Carole Bedos, Pierre Benoit, Colette Bertrand, Céline Decuq, Marjolaine Deschamps, Laure Mamy, Sylvie Nélieu.

The total number of the staff is about 155 people, PhD and post-doc people included