People

PhD candidate

Personal webpage

Research Gate

Google scholar

Eva grew up in a small Mediterranean town in the South of France. Eva decided to nourish her fascination for marine ecosystems by undergoing a 6 months internship with David Mouillot in Montpellier and Joshua Cinner in Australia, working on a global-scale assessment of coral reefs accessibility, based on travel time from human settlements. Currently, Eva is a PhD candidate at the University of Montpellier (France) and James Cook University/ARC Centre of Excellence of Coral Reefs Studies under the supervision of Professors David Mouillot and Joshua Cinner. Her research focuses on defining key drivers of reef fish biodiversity, biomass and functions, in order to understand how fish communities are shaped by both ecological and socio-economic drivers.

Project Title

How socio-economic and ecological factors affect fish biodiversity facets on coral reefs?

Project Description

My current research aims to understand how the heterogeneity of socio-economic and ecological drivers affect the facets of biodiversity in coral reef ecosystems.

1- My main research project aims to provide a novel multi-scale analysis of the socio-economic drivers affecting the biomass and the diversity of the coral reef fishes. From existing global data on reef fish abundance and size but also from new fish surveys and interviews of households involved in small-scale fisheries in Northwest Madagascar, it would be possible to better understand the mechanisms of how human activities impact biomass and functional diversity of coral reef fishes from global to local scale.

2- Another goal of my PhD is to assess the relative contribution of fish species to ecosystem functioning. Indeed, determining whether all species or only a subset are necessary to maintain ecosystem functioning and services is still an unresolved issue. Using a large dataset of ~2,000 reefs, I developed a new community-wide scan approach (analogous to the genome-wide scan) to identify fish species that potentially overcontribute to fish biomass and coral reef health across the Indo-Pacific.

Publications

• Maire, E., Villéger, S., Graham, N. A. J., Hoey, A., Cinner, J., Aliaume, C., Ferse, S. C. A., Booth, D. J., Feary, D. A., Kulbicki, M., Sandin, S. A., Vigliola, L. & Mouillot, D. Community-wide scan flags fish species associated to coral reef services globally. Proceedings B. (in press).

• Villéger, S., Maire, E. & Leprieur, F. (2017). On the risks of using dendrogram to measure functional  diversity and multidimensional space to measure phylogenetic diversity: a comment on Sobral et al. Ecology Letters, 20 : 554-557, ​doi: 10.1111/ele.12750 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.12750/abstract

• Cinner, J.,  Huchery, C., MacNeil, A., Graham, N. A. J., McClanahan, T. R., Maina, J., Maire, E., Kittinger, J. N., Hicks, C. C., Mora, C., Allison, E. H., D’Agata, S., Hoey, A., Feary, D. A., Crowder, L., Williams, I. D., Kulbicki, M., Vigliola, L., Wantiez, L., Edgar, G., Stuart-Smith, R. D., Sandin, S. A., Green, A. L., Hardt, M. J., Beger, M., Friedlander, A., Campbell, S. J., Holmes, K. E., Wilson, S. K., Brokovich, E., Brooks, A. J., Cruz-Motta, J. J., Booth, D. J., Chabanet, P., Gough, C., Tupper, M., Ferse, S. C. A., Sumaila, U. R. & Mouillot, D. (2016). Bright spots among the world’s coral reefs. Nature, 535: 416-419, doi:10.1038/nature18607. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18607

• Maire, E., Cinner, J., Velez, L., Huchery, C., Mora, C., Dagata, S., Vigliola, L., Wantiez, L., Kulbicki, M. & Mouillot, D. (2016). How accessible are coral reefs to people? A global assessment based on travel time. Ecology Letters, 19, 351:360, doi: 10.1111/ele.12577. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.12577/full

• Maire, E., Grenouillet, G., Brosse, S. & Villéger, S. (2015). How many dimensions are needed to accurately assess functional diversity? A pragmatic approach for assessing the quality of functional spaces. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 24(6):728-740, doi: 10.1111/geb.12299. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geb.12299/abstract