Understanding habitat connectivity conservation: biodiversity at what scales?

Created in 2009, HiPhiS is an inter-university seminar organized by Montpellier universities and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Montpellier. It offers high-level scientific outreach on the interdisciplinary and philosophical issues of contemporary science, bringing together perspectives from different disciplines.

Organized around an annual theme, the seminar comprises around ten sessions per year, each consisting of a lecture and a discussion with the audience. HiPhiS is supported by the University of Montpellier, the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry, the CNRS, and the IRES in Montpellier.

In this context, the evening event " Understanding and preserving habitat connectivity: biodiversity at what scales? " will take place on Tuesday, February 3, 2026, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., in the Serge Peytavin amphitheater (Triolet campus) with Cécile Albert (IMBE laboratory – Aix-Marseille), winner of the 2022 CNRS bronze medal.

The loss and fragmentation of natural habitats are the primary cause of the current decline in biodiversity. Among the strategies implemented to halt this decline, the conservation and restoration of ecological connectivity are particularly popular. But the concept of connectivity, as well as those of biodiversity and conservation, raise the question of underlying scales: biological, temporal, spatial, and human scales. How do they overlap and how can they coincide? In the SCALED research project, we have decided to observe the same ecological processes at different scales of time and space in order to better understand the effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity and thus be able to distinguish them from the effects of habitat loss alone.