Understanding how to maintain habitat connectivity: biodiversity at what scales?

Founded in 2009, HiPhiS is an interuniversity seminar organized by the universities of Montpellier and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Montpellier. It offers high-quality popular science presentations on the interdisciplinary and philosophical challenges of contemporary science, bringing together perspectives from various disciplines.

Organized around an annual theme, the seminar consists of about ten sessions per year, each featuring a lecture followed by 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.

As part of this initiative, the 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), recipient 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 in vogue. But the concept of connectivity—as well as those of biodiversity and conservation—raise questions about the underlying scales: biological, temporal, spatial, and human scales—how do they overlap, and can they coincide? In the SCALED research project, we have specifically chosen to observe the same ecological processes at different scales of time and space, to better understand the effects of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity, and thus be able to distinguish them from the effects of habitat loss alone.