Visio : https://bbb.unistra.fr/b/cor-p72-tnk-avx
Tripartite conference - Women in science
15
octobre 2025
11h30
13h30
https://bbb.unistra.fr/b/cor-p72-tnk-avx
Speaker Verónica Herrera Gómez11:30
From Lab to River: Green Roughness & Flood Hydraulics - Toward Sustainable Floodplain Design
Flood risk management is a pressing challenge as climate change intensifies extreme weather events and drives the need for sustainable, ecologically functional floodplain designs. In this context, riverine vegetation plays a key role: it stabilizes banks and supports biodiversity, yet its hydraulic roughness can also raise water levels. This dual role -attenuating flood peaks while potentially increasing local risk- creates a fundamental trade-off. This talk examines vegetation roughness across multiple scales, from laboratory experiments to a large-scale river study. By combining event-based field monitoring with 2D hydrodynamic modeling benchmarked against real flood data, the research demonstrates how spatial and temporal variability in vegetation affects flood dynamics. The results highlight pathways to identify optimal vegetation configurations and promote sustainable floodplain management, maximizing flood attenuation and reducing damage in both urban and agricultural settings.
Speaker Beatriz Kauark Fontes12:00
Uptaking Nature-based Solutions in urban landscapes. Exploring pathways for transformative change.
Nature-based Solutions (NbS)—practices that harness ecosystem services to generate benefits for both people and the environment—oHer a multifunctional, adaptable, and place-specific approach to transforming urban environments. They can simultaneously address climate resilience, biodiversity loss, and human well-being, while promoting long-term sustainability. Despite the rapid rise of NbS in academic research and their endorsement by international agencies, implementation in practice often lags behind. This is largely due to conflicts with prevailing urban development models, institutional inertia, and fragmented governance structures. This research investigates this gap. It explores pathways to strengthen NbS integration and uptake, moving across scales: from the macro level, analyzing how NbS can be embedded into urban policies and planning frameworks; through the meso level, assessing the role of adaptive governance and the eHectiveness of Living Labs as experimental and participatory arenas; and down to the micro level, identifying potential urban blind spots for NbS design, devel.
Speaker Claire Bottini12:30
Carry-over effects of methylmercury exposure on songbirds’ seasonal transition
Organisms regularly adjust their physiology to respond to predictable seasonal or environmental variation. However, annual cycle transitions could be disrupted by contaminants or stressors. For example, methylmercury and stress exposure can independently disrupt birds’ neural and endocrine systems, energy balance, or behaviour, all necessary for seasonal transitions. Although, the effects of combined exposure to stressors and methylmercury (MeHg), and how long they last after exposure ends, are poorly understood. The objective of my PhD was to evaluate the impact of MeHg exposure on songbirds’ physiology and its potential carry-over effects on seasonal transitions. I exposed song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) to environmentally relevant doses of MeHg in combination, or not, with unpredictable food stress. I observed birds’ physiological changes throughout two seasonal transitions: summer to fall and winter to spring. I demonstrated that MeHg is sequestered within feathers at the time of feather growth, making feathers an appropriate tool for bird monitoring under the condition that moult pattern is well characterised in the monitored species. MeHg exposure also increased autumn moult, which can have strong impact on flight ability and migration survival in wild birds. MeHg and unpredictable food stress differently affected autumn nocturnal migratory activity and the combined treatment group had increased fecal corticosterone metabolites post-exposure; both measures were positively correlated. Finally, MeHg reduced bird’s neurogenesis in song control area of the brain, both during and post-exposure. Overall, my thesis main findings were: i) except for corticosterone concentrations food stress did not exacerbate the effects of MeHg exposure, and ii) effects of MeHg on moult, migratory behaviour and neurogenesis may be a potential cause of concern for wild populations. My research highlights the importance of studying contaminant carry-over effects across multiple seasons and post-exposure periods when assessing risk for wildlife.
