Internship: modeling cattle herds in native-tree sylvopastoral systems

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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 join the Herbivores joint research unit (UMRH) as an intern, focusing on modeling cattle herds in silvopastoral systems featuring native trees, with the aim of achieving production that is more sustainable and resilient to climate-related risks. The mission of the unit is to produce, integrate and disseminate knowledge, and share expertise to design multi-performing herbivore farming systems that meet the challenges of global change (environmental, socio-economic and digital transition). The unit has 118 permanent staff and welcomes 70 non-permanent staff each year. It is organized into 4 research teams, a management team and a support team.

You will work within the Livestock Systems, Agroecological Transition, Resilience and Product Quality team (STARQ). You will also interact with researchers and engineers from INRAE’s Joint Research Unit on Grassland Ecosystems (UREP, Clermont-Ferrand) and Agroecology, Genetics, and Tropical Livestock Systems Research Unit (ASSET, Guadeloupe) as well as with colleagues from the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

The project in which you will be involved, entitled SyLvA-Herd (“Synergetic Livestock and Forest Actions for Herd Resilience and Decarbonization in Temperate and Tropical Integrated Systems”), is part of a Franco-Brazilian collaboration. It aims to adapt a farm-scale modeling framework to represent interactions among trees, pasture, herd, management, and climate in tropical beef cattle systems. The objective is to identify configurations that reconcile forage production, herd performance, reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, ecosystem services, and the ability to adapt to climate hazards as part of a transition toward more sustainable beef production.

Sylvopastoral systems based on native trees offer a promising pathway to improve livestock sustainability, yet the combined effects of tree density and functional diversity on different dimensions of sustainability remain poorly understood at the farm scale. The internship will draw on a database collected on commercial farms along the edge of the Amazon region in Brazil, together with information on soils, carbon stocks, GHG emissions, forage biomass and nutritional value, rumen fermentation, grazing management, herd structure, dry-season supplementation, and weather. The central hypothesis is that an optimal trade-off between tree density and diversity can strengthen adaptation–mitigation synergies without compromising cattle-production efficiency.

Your mission will contribute to building scenarios and evaluating sylvopastoral practices using a mechanistic farm-scale model to identify this optimal trade-off. The SEBIEN model (Jouven and Baumont, 2008), which represents a pasture-based suckler beef farm, will serve as the modeling basis. From a scientific perspective, you will analyze how gradients in tree cover and functional diversity affect forage supply, feed balance, and the herd’s productive and environmental performance. From an operational perspective, you will organize the data, parameterize empirical relationships, assess model performance, and build management and climate scenarios.

More specifically, you will be responsible for:

1. organizing, cleaning, and documenting the available plot-, herd-, and climate-scale data, then constructing variables and scenario classes describing tree-canopy density and functional tree diversity;
2. adapting and parameterizing, using R or Python for data preparation and analysis and then within the SEBIEN modeling environment, the relationships linking sylvopastoral system structure to forage production and nutritional value, herd feed balance, animal performance, and GHG emissions;
3. evaluating the model and conducting scenario analyses (o’neill et al., 2014) to identify configurations offering the best trade-off among production, mitigation, and adaptation, through:

• comparing observed and simulated values using graphical inspections and error metrics (ME, MAE, RMSE, R², and model efficiency);
• performing a global sensitivity analysis (Saltelli et al., 2007) to identify the parameters that most influence model outputs;
• simulating a no-tree baseline and sylvopastoral systems differing in tree density and diversity.

 

Bibliography:

Jouven, M., Baumont, R., 2008. Simulating grassland utilization in beef suckler systems to investigate the trade-offs between production and floristic diversity. Agricultural Systems 96, 260–272.

O’Neill, B.C. et al., 2014. A new scenario framework for climate change research: the concept of shared socioeconomic pathways. Climatic Change 122, 387–400.

Saltelli, A. et al., 2007. Global Sensitivity Analysis: The Primer. Wiley.

 

 

Special conditions of activity: Integration into a multidisciplinary environment. Work mainly screen-based, with the possibility of visiting experimental beef and dairy cattle facilities.

Training and skills

Recommended training: Master’s year 2 or engineering school in data science, statistics, agronomy, or animal science.

Required knowledge: Mechanistic modeling, R and Python software, and fluency in spoken English.

Appreciated experience: Temperate and tropical livestock systems, sylvopastoral systems, GHG emissions, sensitivity analyses, or climate scenarios.

Skills: Teamwork, autonomy, rigor, and organizational skills.

INRAE's life quality

The Theix site in Saint-Genès-Champanelle is served by the T2C line (route P39) and an on-demand transport service; it also has parking facilities and services designed for cyclists.

How to apply

I send my CV and my motivation letter