Laurent Seuront 

The research I have been conducted over nearly 20 years now (wow, time flies!) is fundamentally based on a system approach that encompasses several phyla and taxa (from microbes to marine mammals) and a range of habitats (terrestrial, intertidal, coastal and open ocean) considered under various climatic regimes (from polar to tropical) to get a better understanding of the complexity of interactions that rule the structure and function of ecosystems. As such my research seeks universal structural and functional principles, goes well beyond marine-related issues. 

Specifically, my work is devoted to understand

(i) how environmental heterogeneity (e.g. turbulence, topography, resources distribution and thermal landscape) interacts with the behavior of individual organisms to shape ecosystem function, and

(ii) how individual behavior may be used to assess the levels of stress experienced by various organisms and considered as an emerging adaptive property that may dampen the impact of hydroclimatic fluctuations.

The complexity of both environmental heterogeneity and individual behavior are uniquely investigated using concepts and tools borrowed (when not custom designed) from the fields of nonlinear and statistical physics (i.e. fractals, multifractals; self-organized criticality and chaos theory).

Pennington Bay, Kangaroo Island, South Australia

Photo credit: Dorine Seuront, March 2011.