The first International Congress “Ecological Engineering; from concepts to applications”, Paris, was held on 2-4 December, 2009. These three days were dedicated to the exploration for new breakthroughs in ecological engineering and reflections on the way to develop the field and ground it on sound ecological and conceptual bases.

The Congress shown that ecology can provide the conceptual framework necessary to the development of practices that enable to manage natural and anthropized ecosystems in a rational and sustainable way. We saw for instance during these 3 days many examples indicating that ecology can help understanding and disentangling ecological mechanisms that would lead to optimize practices locally adapted to local conditions and to environmental changes. The congress was very interdisciplinary, as the community interested by ecological engineering is really large and diverse. Attenders called for a better linking between theories and concrete applications, and to take into account the less-documented but interesting manipulations at the scale of populations and communities. Evolutionary aspects should then be included in order to scale up from the microcosm to the landscape, from organisms to ecosystems.

Finally, the dialogue should be reinforced in the future to build real systemic and integrated approaches, including people from social (socio-economical, socio-political) sciences, or from other disciplines of engineering (urban ecology, physics, chemistry…).

For further informations, see the presentations that were collected and are shown on this site.

The Organizing Committee wish to thank all the participants.

>>Download EECA poster (pdf 287Ko)

Photo copyright: Sébastien BAROT and Jean-Christophe LATA