The research projects
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Papua: exploring biodiversity in order to conserve it
January 2004
Papua, sometimes called Asia’s garden of Eden, may be the richest part of the world in terms of biodiversity. But there are deforestation programmes for the province and its biological resources are being heavily exploited. The first step towards protecting species is to identify and ...
Protecting our coral reefs: towards an effective world network
January 2002
To protect the biodiversity of the world’s coral reefs, the international organisations have adopted planet-wide conservation strategies including a system of Marine Protected Areas. An international team that includes IRD researchers has shown that at the global level this system is not ...
Understanding flow rate changes in rivers of the Amazon basin
January 2003
The Amazon basin is the world’s largest river basin, covering some six million km². Understanding changes in the flow rate of the Amazon and its tributaries is crucial for local people, whose livelihoods depend on river transport and fishing. The IRD and its partners, who have been studying ...
