Topic: Effects of agricultural practices on beetle diversity at field margins: metabarcoding and community ecology approaches applied to large-scale biodiversity monitoring
Dates: 1 October 2022 – 30 September 2025
CBGP supervisors: C. Meynard, G. Kergoat & J. Haran
University: Univ. Montpellier, ED Gaia

As a PhD student at CBGP, my aim is to understand the impact of plant protection products (PPPs) and their unintended effects (UNEs) on non-target organisms, particularly beneficial insects and pollinators. I focus on UNEs affecting beetle communities, which account for 40% of insect species (341,000 spp out of 1,000,000 spp) and provide important ecosystem services (e.g. ladybirds: potential beneficial insects, May beetles: flower-feeding species). To this end, I study the patterns of species and functional diversity in beetle communities along field margins.

Furthermore, due to a lack of taxonomic expertise, beetles are rarely identified to species level in studies on agricultural UNEs. A second objective of this thesis is to alleviate this taxonomic constraint by developing a methodology and a molecular database using (meta)barcoding approaches (COI).

Keywords: Coleoptera, Metabarcoding, Metacommunity,  Large-scale monitoring, Agricultural practices