Field of expertise
My main research interest is the study of plant-soil organism interactions, soil biodiversity and their impact on ecosystem functioning, and I am now working more specifically in the context of sustainable agriculture and working at FiBL France.

Skills
I have skills in the identification of mesofauna (collembola mites), microbial communities analysis (PLFA, fumigation extraction, ergosterol), soil functions (nutrient cycling, respiration, biolog, microresp, litter decomposition, NO3, NH4, N2O), food webs and energy fluxes, mycorrhizae (AMF and ECM), resistance and resilience to disturbances, stable isotope tracing through plant-soil system (13C and 15N).

Relevant publications
I discovered that secondary metabolites have a key role in regulating the activity of soil organisms and the dynamics of litter decomposition (Chomel et al, 2014; 2016). My work also demonstrated that the ‘home field advantage’ of litter decomposition is more pronounced with more recalcitrant litter (Chomel et al 2015). I have demonstrated the sensitivity of the critical pathway of recent photosynthate transfer from plants to soil organisms to a drought perturbation (Chomel et al, 2019) and that the resistance of an C and N transfer belowground to drought is highly impacted by land management intensity (Chomel et al. 2022, in revision Nat. Com.).

Agriculture
Biogeochemistry
Biology of interactions
Crop Science
Ecology
Entomology
Flow of energy and matter
Forestry and forest sciences

I am interested in the three themes of the call, and more specifically to join project in relation of sustainable agriculture:
- Characterization of global soil biodiversity in agricultural soils (Theme 1 and 3)
- What is the level of biodiversity that we need to manage our agricultural soil in a sustainable way and resistant to perturbation? (theme 2)
- Agricultural soils are in constant degradation, with important loss of organic carbon and biodiversity. How do we help agricultural soil to conserve and/or increase the organic carbon stock and soil biodiversity and improve their structure? (theme 1 and 2)

collembola, mites, soil fauna, carbon cycling, soil food web, litter decomposition, soil biodiversity, agriculture, stable isotope, climate change

GSBI in Dublin, March 2023, online meetings