Urban ecology, stakeholders and the future of ecology.

The world human population is more and more urban and cities have a strong impact on the biosphere. This explains the development of urban ecology. In this context, the goal of our work is fourfold: to describe the diversity of scientific questions in urban ecology, show how these questions are organized, to assess how these questions can be built in close interactions with stakeholders, to better understand the role urban ecology can play within ecological sciences.

Decadal post-fire succession of soil invertebrate communities is dependent on the soil surface properties in a northern temperate forest.

Although fires are common disturbances in North American forests, the extent to which soil invertebrate assemblages recover from burning remains unclear. Here, we examine long-term (14- to 101-yr) recoveries of soil invertebrate communities from common cut and burn treatments conducted at 6 to 26-yr intervals since 1911 in a deciduous forest in the upper Great Lakes region (USA). We characterize soil surface macro-invertebrate communities during both fall and spring across a long-term, experimental fire chronosequence to characterize invertebrate community recovery at decadal time-scales and community changes between seasons.

Assessment of derelict soil quality: Abiotic, biotic and functional approaches.

The intensification and subsequent closing down of industrial activities during the last century has left behind large surfaces of derelict lands. Derelict soils have low fertility, can be contaminated, and many of them remain unused. However, with the increasing demand of soil surfaces, they might be considered as a resource, for example for non-food biomass production.

Litter chemistry prevails over litter consumers in mediating effects of past steel industry activities on leaf litter decomposition.

Soil pollution has adverse effects on the performance and life history traits of microorganisms, plants, and animals, yet evidence indicates that even the most polluted sites can support structurally-complex and dynamic ecosystems. The present study aims at determining whether and how litter decomposition, one of the most important soil ecological processes leaf, is affected in a highly trace-metal polluted site. We postulated that past steel mill activities resulting in soil pollution and associated changes in soil characteristics would influence the rate of litter decomposition through two non-exclusive pathways: altered litter chemistry and responses of decomposers to lethal and sub-lethal toxic stress.

A thesaurus for soil invertebrate trait-based approaches.

Soil invertebrates are known to be much involved in soil behaviour and therefore in the provision of ecosystem services. Functional trait-based approaches are methodologies which can be used to understand soil invertebrates' responses to their environment. They (i) improve the predictions and (ii) are less dependent on space and time.