UC Davis Seminar: French Reseacher to Target Climate Change

You won't want to miss ecologist Sylvain Pincebourde's virtual seminar on climate change, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology an Nematology.

Pincebourde, a  research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France, will speak on "The Key Role of Microclimates in Modulating the Response of Ectotherms to Climate Change," at 4:10 p.m. (Pacific Time) on Wednesday, March 15 via Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672

Pincebourde, a research director at the (CNRS), France, says in his abstract: "In a warming world, species may buffer to some extent part of the environmental changes by exploiting the microclimates that are available across space and time. My presentation will focus on the role of the leaf surface microclimate, and in particular temperature, in driving the vulnerability of insects to climate change. I will exemplify the framework we apply to investigate this role. Our approach is deeply rooted into a multidisciplinary background, relying on physics, physiology and ecology of both plant and animal sciences. The microclimatic effects can be quite subtle and mechanistic approaches are fundamentally needed to depict the complexity of the interaction between plant, insect and climate."

On Research Gate, Pincebourde explains that his work "focuses on the role of microclimates in modulating the response of ectotherms (mostly insects) to climate change. I use ecophysiological approaching mostly relying to thermal ecology, connected to the biophysical ecology of organisms. I integrate both temporal and spatial issues of thermal variability. My research has connection with conservation biology by identifying novel or unsuspected interactions between (micro) climates and organisms."

Urban landscape entomologist Emily Meineke, assistant professor with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and coordinator of the department's weekly seminars, will host the seminar and introduce him.

Pincebourde holds a doctorate (2005) from the Institute of Research on Insect Biology (IRBI), France, a joint research unit of the University of Tours and CNRS. He studied for his doctorate with Professor Jérôme Casas. Pincebourde then completed postdoctoral fellowships at the University South Carolina (2006-2007), supervised by Professor Brian Helmuth, and at IRBI (2008-2009), working with Professor Casas's team that studied the ecology of multitropic systems and biomimetism.

Pincebourde joined CNRS as a research scientist, second class, in 2009 and advanced to first class in 2015. Since 2018, he has been in charge of the IRBI's organism-environmental interactions team, known as INOV or the INteractions Organisme-enVironnment.

He has published his work in a number of journals, including Frontiers in Ecology and EvolutionEcological MonographsAgriculture and Forest EntomologyFunctional EcologyJournal of Thermal Biology, Biotropica, with papers pending in Global Change Biology and Freshwater Biology. He is a member of the editorial board for American Naturalist. 

The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's winter seminars are held on Wednesdays at 4:10 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. (See schedule.) She may be reached at ekmeineke@ucdavis.edu for technical issues.