The best thing about Christmas is the BES Annual Meeting. Some of the lab members – Seraina, Eric and Noémie – attended the venue in Birmingham and had the chance to follow an extraordinary selection of talks and posters. Among others, we saw a great session about long-term experiments, what has been done and what is to do next (Andy Hector, Alexandra Weigelt and others). To the question “are you also part of a long term experiment?”, we are now answering: “we just started one”. We also saw presentations about phylogenetic and functional traits linked to multifunctionality (Y. Le Bagousse-Pinguet), upscaling BEF experiments results to landscape diversity (G. Le Provost), a great citizen science project looking at herbivory drivers on oaks (E. Valdés-Correcher) and my personal favourite, tracing C and N flows in grassland plants and soil food webs (M. Chomel).

A whole wall was covered in drawings due to the Journal of Applied Ecology brilliant suggestion to “draw your study organism” (see Seraina’s work of art, #PaNDiv), and we could even play cards with the Catastrophic game supporting systems thinking (P. Holland).

Let’s not forget the great poster about sick plants in grassland communities (S. Cappelli) and a presentation disentangling nitrogen direct and indirect effects on decomposition (N. Pichon).

What a nice and motivating end to 2018 and look forward to 2019!

NP & SC

Study organism drawings

The vegetative traits are for sure right

Noémie and the decomposition

Another highlight of the conference: Phil Grime in front of his poster

Seraina and sick plants