The research projects
Page 1 : Results 1 to 10 on 27
Agroecology in Vietnam
January 2005 - December 2008
The astounding economic growth of Southeast Asia, and of Vietnam in particular, is not without consequences for the environment. As increasing demands are made on the land, soils are becoming acidified, losing their mineral and organic content and eroding. The nutrients they lose pollute ...
Endangered coral ecosystems : Marine protected areas could help
January 2005
Coral reefs, which are home to thousands of fish species, are today threatened with extinction. The cause: global warming, which is killing the corals as ocean temperatures rise. In collaboration with an international team, the IRD has measured the long-term impact of El Niño on Indian Ocean ...
Farming the giant of the Amazon
January 2006
The Amazon and its tributaries are home almost a tenth of global biodiversity in freshwater fish. But intensive fishing of Arapaima gigas, the "giant of the Amazon" threatens the survival of the species in the region, and hence its biodiversity. Fish farming opens prospects for ...
Fish and fishermen in South America: a game of hide and seek
November 2010
The world’s largest single-species fishery is based on a fish less than eight inches long: the Peruvian anchovy. The annual catch is very variable, and has oscillated between 0.1 and 15 million tonnes since the 1960s. Daily catches can be as much as 170,000 tonnes (for comparison, the French ...
Forecasting water resources in the Sahel for 2050 ?
The Sahel is particularly vulnerable to climate change, and recent changes in its surface water levels have not been the simple, directly result of rainfall trends. Human activity and climate change have a signifi cant impact on the dynamics of surface runoff from the land into streams and ...
Geodynamics of mineral resources in West Africa
January 2006
Mineral resources account for more than 50% of exports from the 19 West African countries involved in the Agremoa programme. They play a crucial role in the region’s development. The IRD and its partners are working to improve understanding of the geological structure and geodynamics of the West ...
Imagery for tropical forest management
January 2002
To manage tropical rainforest sustainably it is essential to be able to estimate and map the descriptive parameters of the vegetation, such as biomass and biodiversity, for a large area of forest. But these ecosystems are extremely complex, so parameters of this kind can only be directly ...
Impact of climate change on the Humboldt current ecosystem
January 2001
The Humboldt Current system off the coast of Peru and Chile, an outstandingly productive marine ecosystem, receives the full impact of climatic disturbances moving in from the Pacific. Researchers from the IRD and the Instituto del Mar del Perú (IMARPE) are producing the first scientific ...
Improving rice growing in Africa
January 1996
Rice, the first cereal humans ever cultivated, is a vital resource for many Southern countries. In Africa, rice yellow mottle virus is a major problem, causing considerable damage and heavy losses at harvest. Prophylactic measures have been employed to limit the spread of the disease, but the ...
Lake Chad : Adapting to a fluctuating resource
Lake Chad, located in the heart of the Sahel strip, is a vital water resource for fishermen, herders and crop farmers in the countries that border its shores − Niger, Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon. The lake has undergone enormous changes in recent decades. A multidisciplinary research program ...
