Research laboratories

AMAP joint research unit is an interdisciplinary laboratory that conducts basic research on plants and plant communities with the aim of predicting ecosystems responses to environmental forcing, in terms of the distribution/conservation of species and biodiversity, crop production, carbon storage in plant biomass, protection of the environment and the provision of ecosystem services.
Our research concerns Mediterranean, temperate and tropical plant communities. It is cutting edge research in botany, plant ecology, agronomy, forestry and in computer science, applied statistics and mathematics.

Research is transversal, in the sense most researchers contribute to more than one axis:

• Plant biodiversity in the past and present
Forms and functions of taxa and communities in the past and present.

• Resource allocation and biomass distribution in individual plants and in plant communities
Ontogenetic and environmental regulation of forms and structures; dynamic interactions between plants and the environment; emergent properties in heterogeneous plant communities.

• Modeling the plant world
Methods for studying and modeling complex plant systems; theoretical formalisms and properties of dynamic systems; algorithmic and numerical simulation of long term dynamics; anatomical and remote sensing image analysis; shared systems for the identification and management of plant data.