Postdoctoral position in Arthropod food webs in citrus orchards in Corsica

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INRAE presentation

The French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) is a major player in research and innovation. It is a community of 12,000 people with 272 research, experimental research, and support units located in 18 regional centres throughout France. Internationally, INRAE is among the top research organisations in the agricultural and food sciences, plant and animal sciences, as well as in ecology and environmental science. It is the world’s leading research organisation specialising in agriculture, food and the environment. INRAE’s goal is to be a key player in the transitions necessary to address major global challenges. Faced with a growing world population, climate change, resource scarcity, and declining biodiversity, the Institute has a major role to play in building solutions and supporting the necessary acceleration of agricultural, food and environmental transitions.

Work environment, missions and activities

You will be welcomed at IGEPP (INRAE), in the team EGI (Ecologie et Génétique des Insectes https://igepp.rennes.hub.inrae.fr/equipes-de-recherche/egi-ecologie-et-genetique-des-insectes), in collaboration with Elsa Canard (INRAE) and Manuel Plantegenest (Institut Agro Rennes), as part of the Ecophyto II+ IRIS project, "IRIS: Improving Risk Inference by Surveillance of biological regulation services", which includes CIRAD's PHIM and AGAP (Montpellier) units and INRAE's IGEPP (Rennes) and BioSP (Avignon) joint research units.

An overview of the IRIS project:

The IRIS project aims to optimise the monitoring of crop diseases and pests and adjust the use of pesticides by exploiting the idea that plant health is enhanced by the density and complexity of the auxiliary communities associated with plants - the phytobiome - which reduce proliferation and emergence through the interactions they have with harmful organisms.

IRIS focuses on a pilot system: citrus crops in Corsica. This emblematic crop, already struggling with established diseases and pests (mealybugs, Mediterranean fruit fly, etc.), is also under threat from the emergence of new health constraints (citric canker, HLB, oriental fruit fly).

IRIS is working on an unprecedented inventory of the composition of the citrus phytobiome and its interpretation in terms of health risks and natural regulation, by producing inventories of multi-range biodiversity (viruses, bacteria, fungi, oomycetes and arthropod pests and predators) in citrus plots on the scale of the agricultural landscape using high-throughput sequencing techniques (viral metagenomics, microbial metabarcoding, food metabarcoding).

The main objective of this post-doctoral work is to contribute to the description of interactions between arthropod pests and predators by analysing high-throughput sequencing data produced in the first phase of the project.

• Detailed objectives of the Post-Doc project:

This Post-Doc project will focus on the responses of the arthropod food web in clementine orchards to various factors. The study will assess 1) the composition of the natural enemy and prey community, 2) the presence of ants on aphid colonies, 3) the agricultural production system (organic vs. conventional farming), and 4) the landscape around the plot (eg proportion of natural habitat).  The aim is to discover what leads an orchard to host high-performance food webs with numerous and consistent pest regulations.

The analyses will be carried out in R with the help of ecological network analysis packages, with the aim of constructing local and general food webs, as well as calculating metrics in order to summarise its functioning.

• You will be in charge of:

- Management of previously sequenced data

- Cleaning and demultiplexing the sequences using appropriate pipelines

- Building and graphic representation of the trophic networks observed in the orchards

- Assessing trophic structure metrics and analysing the influence of the factors studied

- Broadcasting results (publications and presentations)

- Participating in the scientific and organisational life of the EGI team

Training and skills

Knowledge required:

• Bioinformatics (analysis of NGS metabarcoding data)
• Geneious software or other sequence analysis tools
• English spoken and written

Appreciated experience:

• Ecology of communities and interactions, Diversity sciences
• Programming
• Genetics

Skills sought:

• Enjoys working in a team, but is able to work independently
• Good written and oral communication skills

INRAE's life quality

By joining our teams, you benefit from (depending on the type of contract and its duration):

- up to 30 days of annual leave + 15 days "Reduction of Working Time" (for a full time);
- parenting support: CESU childcare, leisure services;
- skills development systems: training, career advise;
- social support: advice and listening, social assistance and loans;
- holiday and leisure services: holiday vouchers, accommodation at preferential rates;
- sports and cultural activities;
- collective catering.

How to apply

I send my CV and my motivation letter