This project explores the ways in which biomedical research generates memory and how its past practices are remembered, memorialized, commemorated, erased and lived with in African institutions, populations and landscapes. Combining archival and ethnographic methods, we focus on the material forms and practices of remembering (and forgetting) medical research around three medical research stations in Sub-Saharan Africa. Located in formerly French, German and British colonies, the sites of Ayos (Cameroon), Muheza/Amani (Tanzania) and Niakhar (Senegal) share long histories of medical research that link up distant and proximate pasts of glory, dilapidation, rehabilitation and hope. We open these sites to inquiry in three methodological strands. The first, Ruination & Renovation treats the materialisations of research within these sites as archives; that is, as repositories of memory about the succession, coexistence and collision of past scientific practices and processes. The second, Living Memory & Amnesia explores how the materials of past research are inhabited and described, as well as ignored and omitted, by research(ed) communities. In the third, Memory Work, we turn to the deliberate creation, collection, ordering and preservation of materials for remembering past research. By investigating the built, archived, inhabited and recounted pasts of medical research in these sites, we will excavate the political and material histories of these field laboratories; ascertain the affective resonance of their past purposes in their present form; and describe how remembering and forgetting are woven into the social texture of their everyday life. In drawing insights across these cases, we aim to shed light on how international public health practices have evolved in response to colonial, developmental and neoliberal visions of Africa and the ways in which landscapes, bodies, personal memories and institutions in Africa have been differently inscribed by the trajectories of medical science. This collaborative enterprise thus seeks to enrich comparative imperial and post-colonial history, sociological understandings of science, the anthropology of African modernities, and international medical research ethics.

This proposal focuses on the first thematic axis: complex systems modeling, and closely respond to the modeling of environmental sciences thematic of the call for proposal, specifically oceanography. The ocean, coupled with other components (atmosphere, continent, and ice) is a building block of the earth system. Recent events have raised questions on social and economic implications of anthropic alterations of the earth system, i.e. both its long-term evolution and extreme events. A better understanding of the ocean system is a key ingredient for improving our prediction of such implications. Ocean models are essential tools to understand key processes, simulate and forecast events of various space and time scales. The whole French ocean modeling community has been recently assembled under the group name COMODO (COmmunauté de Modélisation Océanique). This community is diverse and offers a variety of applications and numerical approaches for ocean modeling; it also relies at various degrees on the international community. For the first time, this proposal reflects a global effort of the French community to strengthen interactions between its members. This common effort will be directed towars two main objectives: improvement of existing models and numerical methods, guidelines for the development of future generation ocean models. Existing ocean models suffers from a number of well-identified issues that will be addressed during this project. To improve on those issues, the present proposal suggests an innovative evaluation of dissipation mechanisms especially in the context of submesoscale modelling and an improvement of advection-diffusion schemes for the reduction of spurious diapycnal mixing for the accurate representation of active and passive tracers. The second part of the proposal is based on recent advances of our community on vertical coordinate systems, unstructured meshes and non-hydrostatic modelling. The objective is here both to continue fundamental research in these topics and to contribute to the design of future generation models involving their system of equations and numerical methods. The proposed developments will be evaluated thanks to a benchmark suite that covers both idealized test cases design to assess basic important properties of numerical schemes and more complex test cases that will be set-up for a thorough evaluation of progresses made during this project. This benchmark suite, accompanied with the results of the different models, will be made publicly available so as to provide elements for future model developments as well as an opportunity for more theoretical work on numerical schemes to be evaluated in the context of ocean modeling.

Species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. This extinction is largely associated with global changes from land use to climate variation. Tropical rain forests (TRFs) harbor high diversity, representing 50% of terrestrial species biodiversity on just 10% of the land. Moreover, TRF provide vital ecosystem services and are also considered important global climate regulators. A better understanding of past dynamics and future resilience of TRF will provide vital information for pinpointing conservation strategy priorities and help management of TRF. The current project will focus on the TRFs of Central Africa where the local diversity is thought to be highly threatened. The main questions we address are: How have species been able to adapt to past change? How will genetic diversity within species be affected by ongoing climate change? In this project, we plan to answer these questions using a multispecies approach and an unprecedented genetic dataset for African plant species. Our objectives will be to 1) test different hypotheses of Central African rain forests dynamics in the past within and between species and 2) infer the potential resilience of this ecosystem to future climate change. To do so, a comparative phylogeography approach combined with species distribution modeling will be undertaken simultaneously on six co-distributed plant species in Central Africa and belonging to two model rain forest restricted plant families: Annonaceae and palms. These species combine several important features facilitating the project: easily identifiable in the field; characteristic and common across Central African TRFs and; availability of good preliminary data. For all sampled individuals (~660) we will sequence full plastomes and about one hundred nuclear markers using NGS. We will link past genetic dynamics with estimated climatically stable areas inferred by paleoclimatic modeling. Preliminary results indicate that for at least one species of palms, inferred climatically stable areas are congruent with high and unique genetic diversity in Central Africa. Future species distributions will be integrated with current genetic diversity knowledge to generate heat maps of threatened and high priority areas for conservation. Results of the project will greatly improve our understating of rain forest evolution and its response to ongoing climate change. This study will be of value to the fields of evolutionary biology, conservation biology and management as well as human evolutionary history. AFRODYN is unique in that it will use methods from an array of interdisciplinary fields integrating paleo and future climatic modeling, ecology, molecular biology and population genetics. Such an approach will set the stage for a better region-wide understanding of the threats to African rain forest biodiversity and the regions of high conservation priority.

Pesticides are of limited use against bacterial diseases in crops due to a lack of effective and non-toxic molecules. Thus, genetic selection of resistant crops remains the most effective approach to control bacterial pathogens. Resistance breeding requires a conceptual jump to efficiently design significant and durable resistance to a large variety of pathogens in a large number of crops simultaneously. The CROpTAL project aims at identifying plant susceptibility hubs in major crops (cereals, citrus, legumes and brassicaceae) targeted by Xanthomonas virulence-promoting TAL (Transcription Activator-Like) type III effectors. These conserved susceptibility targets could then be used for marker-assisted breeding of loss-of-susceptibility by selection of inactive variants of those hubs. These results will contribute to the development of durable resistance to a broad range of bacterial pathogens in the selected crops.

Trace elements and their isotopes (TEIs) play a crucial role in the ocean and can be used as tracers for past and modern oceanic processes. Studying their biogeochemical cycles has direct implications in diverse research areas such as carbon cycling, climate, ocean ecosystems and environmental contamination. In this context, GEOVIDE proposes to undertake an integrated oceanographic transect in the North Atlantic and Labrador Sea. This area is crucial for the Earth climate and the thermohaline circulation as it represents a major overturning area of the so-called Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC). Moreover, TEI distribution is poorly constrained in this area. GEOVIDE is an international collaborative programme which aims at better constraining the uncertainties on water and heat fluxes across the cruise section, notably by adding information on the deep water mass export and circulation, but also in providing new information on chemical element fluxes. GEOVIDE will allow the quantification of processes that influence the distribution of key TEIs in this area, in particular advective and scavenging processes, biological uptake, exchanges with the margins, and atmospheric deposition. The main scientific objectives of GEOVIDE are to: 1- Better know and quantify the MOC and the carbon cycle in a decadal variability context, adding new key tracers 2- Map the TEI distribution with their physical and chemical speciation along a full-depth high resolution ocean section 3- Characterize the TEI sources and sinks and quantify their fluxes at the ocean boundaries 4- Investigate the link between the TEIs, and the production, export and remineralisation of particulate organic matter 5- Better understand and quantify the paleoproxies 231Pa/230Th, Nd isotopes, and Si isotopes. The project is based on a 44-day oceanographic cruise on the R/V “Pourquoi Pas?” (summer 2014). We will use a series of novel techniques and state-of-the-art instrumentation. The strength of the project resides in its interdisciplinarity: physical oceanography, geochemistry and biogeochemistry will be coupled, merging observation and modelling. GEOVIDE gathers highly qualified scientific teams from five different countries. This project will be the French contribution in the North Atlantic to the Global GEOTRACES TEI survey (official GA01 GEOTRACES section) and will provide essential information, notably for the modelling of the present and past ocean, on TEI distributions in this key area of the thermohaline circulation. GEOVIDE will also actively contribute to other international programmes, such as SOLAS, IMBER, CARBOCHANGE and CLIVAR. GEOVIDE is part of the axis 2 of the LabexMER “A changing Ocean” and is linked to the Equipex NAOS “Novel Argo Ocean observing System”, in particular to the WP5 “Deep oxygen floats in the North Atlantic”. GEOVIDE is also a strong international and original action of the UPEE Pole in the framework of the IDEX UNITI in Toulouse. Finally, GEOVIDE has an educational component at various academic levels and the results of the project will be incorporated into materials for web dissemination and public outreach, as well as through scientific publications and presentations at international conferences. Five young scientists (three research associates and two PhD students) will be trained during this project. The results obtained during this project will be available through various databases (SISMER, LEFE-CYBER, and the GEOTRACES International Data Assembly Centre).