Meet our partners: Florent Mouillot

Role in FIRE-ADAPT: co-leader of the thematic area “modelling and forecasting”

Organisation: Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (CEFE), Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) 

Country: France

What motivated me to join FIRE-ADAPT  

I have experience in fire hazard impact mostly on Mediterranean areas, and I was interested in exploring new ecosystems, dry ecosystem in South America and savannahs.

What my area of work  in the project pursues  

We aim to integrate all the knowledge from the other areas of work, including carbon´s and biodiversity´s, into processes that we are able to model. Then, once we have these modeling tools well suited to simulate all the processes we identified in the field, we want to use them to play with some scenarios of forest management to figure out how these different management strategies would have a true impact on the future fire hazard, the carbon abatement and any other aspect that we would be able to simulate with the models. 

The interest of having these modeling tools is that we’ll be able to create our own scenarios, proposed, for example by the stakeholders, and compare the fire hazard, the carbon abatement or biodiversity impact that would have happened if we don’t apply these management strategies. So, the modeling tools are able to compare a scenario with some proposed features with a scenario without them, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the first one. 

How we are going to achieve it

First of all, we need to collect as much information as we can to tune the models so that they are efficient enough to trust them fully in their impact assessment. Once we know that the tools work and behave well enough to simulate the reality that we have set up from the observation data, we will be using these tools for the scenarios we are building. 

What strengths of the partners come together in this area of work

This work is cooperative. We have modelers who are scientists aiming to transform processes into equations. We have two kinds of modelers:  vegetation modelers able to simulate all the biological processes, and the fire spread modelers, able to simulate the physics of heat transfer and the propagation of fires. The two models feed back into each other: the vegetation model feed the fire spread model, and the fire spread´s affects the vegetation´s. 

Then, both modeling groups need input data from stakeholders or field scientists to tune their processes of vegetation growth, carbon allocation and accumulation, and observations of previous fire spread from satellite, for example. So the tuning of the model is really cooperative. Everybody will interact for this area of work: stakeholders, scientists to build up the scenarios of future management strategies based on the cost, the possibility to do them, and the hypothesis that the stakeholder can have, and the modelers will generate these scenarios in their models and the outputs. The stakeholder will analyse these outputs and compare them with their initial idea and the expected results, and hopefully will make decisions accordingly. 

This is me 

Favourite food: exotic food

Favourite film: The Color Purple, by Steven Spielberg

Favourite singer or band: Juliette Armanet

I admire: my PhD supervisor 

Superpower I´d like to have: survive without sleeping to have a lot of time to do many things.

In France, I´d take you to: if it´s your first time, to Versailles.