Hi! I am Margot, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Causes and Consequences of Biodiversity Change group of the Senckenberg BiK-F in Frankfurt, Germany, as part of the Biodiversity Exploratories.

Before that, I worked as a PhD candidate in Sorbonne Universités (Paris, France) and Institute of Research for Development, where I studied the interactions between non-cultivated plant communities, farming practices and soil characteristics in Northern Thailand.

My study areas in Northern Thailand and in Germany. Photo credit: Margot Neyret and Pete Manning

As a community ecologist by training, much of my work has focused on understanding the mechanisms structuring biological communities in response to environmental constraints and land use. I used both taxonomic and functional trait approaches to understand the response of plant and multi-taxa communities to environmental gradients, at different temporal and spatial scales.

Over time, I have adopted increasingly interdisciplinary approaches as I developed my research within the field of ecosystem service science. My work focuses on assessing the impact of nature on human quality of life and thus acknowledges the need to integrate both ecosystem conservation and human needs into environmental policies. One originality of my research is thus to address the gap between the ecological (i.e. process-based relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning) and social (Nature’s contributions to human well-being; social trade-offs between stakeholders) components of social-ecological systems.