WEBVTT

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Yes.

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Yes, can you hear me? Okay, so let me…

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I guess you can see the slides, right? Okay, good.

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So yes, I will talk about biodiversity. So one thing, I'm a physicist, so I'm not an expert of this field, of course.

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And the second point is that I'm used to talk about it in French and not in English, so I do not know all the technical words, but I will do my best.

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So yeah, this is about countering the biodiversity loss using particle physics research sites.

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So the first question is, why should we care about this? And there are a number of arguments.

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For example, losses of biodiversity are not reversible or also to those for better carbon storage But there is one argument which speaks to everybody, which is the usefulness of biodiversity for humans.

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So this is called the ecosystem services and there are a number of services like for example food through pollination or medicines or regulations of erosion, for example, or tourism.

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And if we have less efficient services, we need to replace them with artificial solutions.

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And therefore, it's expensive. No, there's a word of caution here. This is, I mean, ecosystem services It's an accidental concept because talking about this supposes that We can see their nature and human as two different things. And this does not make sense in all the cultures.

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So in my opinion, if we pretend to do inclusive research, this means that we should maintain biodiversity for itself.

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Noah, do we often think that biodiversity is On the animal side, we see biodiversity as endangered species or cute species like dolphins.

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Or otherwise useful species like, for example. Honeybees sorry i'm trying to i'm fighting with my laser pointer because i have this I have this rectangle which I cannot get rid of in the middle of my screen. Okay, never mind.

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And on the plant side. It's pretty much the same view. We can add the trees because they are the long And also flowers because they feed the honeybees If we have this view in mind, we conclude that, well, our labs are not a protected area. They are not

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They do not have large surfaces and they do not host rare species. So in this view, we do not have anything to do in our laboratories and my top would be finished.

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But if we look into what's happening in the cities, we see that something still seems possible.

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So if we look at the right-hand side figure, I will get back to it later, but we can see honeybees and we can also see beautiful trees. So apparently it answers at least partially the question.

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So this is good, but now if we look into more a more scientific definition of biodiversity.

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It can be defined as a diversity of species, also a diversity of ecosystems that is of the links between the species and it's not obvious on the the first group of pictures, but these are all pictures of very, very similar ecosystems.

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And the third part is genetic diversity. So on the top you can see a a field of basically clones and on the bottom instead you can see a field of wild plants and the genetic diversity can be seen here by the diversity of the color of the flowers.

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So we often quote the losses of species. They are very impressive figures. But again, if we have this view in mind, we conclude that we do not have to do anything in our laboratories.

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Instead, there also are losses of populations. As you can see here, I will not go into the details.

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Losses of ecosystems and of resilience And this means that ecosystem services get degraded.

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And there also are more risks. The second point is that The common species that is the species that we sort of encounter every day are the necessary basis for ecosystem services to be efficient.

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And also for rare species to settle. Therefore, the conclusion is that, yes, in our laboratories, we can do something.

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Now, where should we act? And so I talk about the laboratories but um In a more general view, the question where essentially means in place of what? Because all pieces of land are occupied by species.

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Now it has been established that the first cause of biodiversity loss in Europe are agricultural practices.

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But this is a very difficult area to work on. For various reasons, essentially this in place of what question Instead, in the laboratories, it's rather easy in the sense that we do not replace something. We just add something on top of our laboratories.

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So these are not necessarily These actions would not be enough, but they are necessary. Now, if we go into the causes of the five major causes of biodiversity loss.

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We contribute, we as a high energy physics to pretty much all those causes, but I would like to focus on the loss and fragmentation of habitats.

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We occupy small surfaces, but there could be high stakes. Back to this picture, if we look more carefully now about this picture, we can see that The honeybees, while they compete with wild bees, they are plants, but they are ornamental plants. There is no diversity

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There are trees, but there are exotic species and also there is a pathway here Which makes it maybe improbable that a bird makes a nest in this tree because the bird would be disturbed by the movement on the pathway.

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So this has been built with this picture in mind and this is not optimal.

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So what do we do then? We can get back to this definition of diversity, but also we can add the fact, for example, that animals must eat, they must rest they must move and they must communicate.

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And this drives the site organization and management. So there are some recommendations as per the vegetal species.

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We should also create a diversity of habitats and also even habitats which we do not really find beautiful.

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We should create habitat connectivity that is corridors on the side, but also between the site and the surrounding areas.

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We should reduce the sources of disturbance and it could be physical obstacles or traps for animals, but also light and noise can be disturbance.

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And we should also create quiet zones, that is zones with low human presence.

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A few more things. Because we have to take surrounding areas into considerations.

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It is important to have a reflection about the new sites or new accelerators.

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For example, about their diameter say about Because the location of, for example, the access shafts would change.

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And this has a consequence on the network of corridors in all the surrounding area.

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I talked about the consequences on the site organization and these consequences translate into choices on the buildings, streets etc Also underground networks, as I will show And the last point is that a budget has to be anticipated, for example, for

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Building some buildings um well building buildings with some characteristics or maybe some few squared meters to buy. So biodiversity must be taken into account from the beginning of the projects. And now I just spend half a minute on a

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Real cases in a laboratory, you cannot really see but in this plan actually we wanted to plant trees because it was relevant and we could not because there were all different networks underground, so it was not possible to plant trees.

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Or here, a tree that was hosting a number of birds had to be cut because there was too little space with respect to the surrounding buildings. We wanted also to plant trees on the south part of the building because

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To make shadow in summer and air cooling and it was not possible because this was the firefighter access And last point, the blue track which you see here is the access for the trucks So in all this way, so part of it is not really used apart from drugs

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But this fact makes it impossible to remove the asphalt. So this means that if biodiversity is not taken into account very early in the project.

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There can be irreversible things. And you can see here on those two different schemes on the right.

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Both schemes, for example, have a corridor, they have a road A building and a source of noise, but those two different schemes have different impacts on biodiversity.

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So this, of course, is a work which has to be done by experts, but there's a lot of feedback from many kilometer size projects. So there is material to start with.

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And my last slide is about specific characteristics of high energy physics sites.

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They are hosted by nonprofit institutions, so this allows for a non-biased approach.

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And there's a stable governance for decades. And this is extremely important for biodiversity restoration.

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We cover wide areas and We can do interesting things with connections. You can see here a virgo here Which, um, which at least up to recently was a very strong barrier in the middle of this environment while it could have been a very beautiful corridor

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You can see here the plots hosted by CERN, the properties of CERN. We map really squared kilometers.

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And we also have rarely visited technical zones Which means that we can create quiet areas And also we can be a showcase which would trigger similar actions.

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And this was my My conclusion, I just want to flash this to say that biodiversity is also possible.

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On the buildings themselves. You can see here this building which shows a full connection with a lot of different environments, full connections from ground level to roof level where you can see children going in the forest.

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That's it.

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Thank you very much. It was indeed an intriguing talk, a different kind of talk.

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Definitely. So yeah, please go ahead with any questions. Anyone?

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Okay, we still have some time, so maybe just I can ask you um more rather on your experience on this. So what were kind of like, did you find anything so i believe you were also involved in implementing all of these designs.

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Not at an expert level, of course. Yeah, but on small scales.

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Or… Yeah, but… Yeah, so what were your like positive or negative experiences while implementing this and like talking to people integrating stuff like this?

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Yeah, I think that the most difficult part that I encounter is this thing that is what people have in mind.

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And what are the consequences on um on the organization, I mean, of the project what comes out This really is the major problem. And the second point, which is also correlated to this is anthropocentrism in the sense that when people make choice about

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A project taken care of biodiversity what comes in mind is always first usefulness for humans.

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For example like uh you know it's exactly this you know putting the the honeybees and maybe planting fruit trees etc but fruit trees are not so useful as wild trees for a fauna, for example.

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So we first have to deconstruct all I don't know the technical terms. I apologize, but all the beliefs of the people about what would be good for biodiversity And the last point, which is again correlated is this thing that you need the nettle, you need the deadwood and you need the neglected areas and all these things

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That look bad. People think that biodiversity should be beautiful, but it is not the case.

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Clear.

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Hi, thanks for the interesting talk. So recently in the interesting there's certain bullets in there advertise this new zone biodiversity web application And I was wondering if you… Oh, pardon that.

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Yeah.

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And yeah.

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No, I very rarely go to CERN. So no, I'm not, but I am in other on other places, yes.

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Okay. Yeah, it made me, I mean, I'm excited to use it now once I'm back at Zone.

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Um yeah now now with your presentation I was thinking of the ways that they possibly use this data.

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So I hadn't thought so much about invasive species And so on.

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Yes, yes, exactly. Actually, the point, yeah, this is actually an interesting question.

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The importance of this is that it provides data. It provides data not only to the scientists on a global scale but also to CERN in this case.

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For making plans for organizing the site. In the sense that, well, maybe, okay, I know my pictures are not very clear but on the bottom here you can see this sketch before reflecting about how you would organize the site um

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You need first to make to make the point of the situation and understand what there is on the side. So the very first thing The very first step is a step of observation.

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And CERIN has already made a number of actions. But I guess that this project has those two aims. The first one is to make this observation and understand what we can find on the site and measure the evolution possibly but also

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To decide what to do, what is relevant to do. And then the second point is to The second aim is to aim involved persons involved in persons Because this has been shown to be an important step to have people understand that biodiversity is an important topic and it can be reached through this kind of projects.

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Even for projects that would not have a scientific aim, really.

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Yeah. Yeah, thanks.

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And there are also if you would like could you also share this um links of the app in the chat so that all of us can follow.

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That would be very nice. Thank you. So thank you again, Julian.

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For