A unique exhibition combining science, art and environmental awareness, TERRA MAR is on show at the Planet Ocean
Montpellier Aquarium from 17 June to 30 September. Designed for all ages, it was created by the TAPIOCA International Joint Laboratory as part of the Year of the Sea in France and the France-Brazil 2025 season.
On Thursday, 11 September 2025, Arnaud Bertrand, IRD researcher at MARBEC, co-organiser of the TERRA MAR exhibition and co-coordinator of the LMI TAPIOCA, will give a special lecture at Planet Ocean Montpellier from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m., to share his discoveries on the marine biodiversity of the south-western tropical Atlantic and the challenges involved in preserving it.
Coordinated by the IRD, a French research institute, and the Federal and Federal Rural Universities of Pernambuco (UFPE and UFRPE) in Brazil, Terra Mar brings together more than 150 French and Brazilian researchers and students. The exhibition will also be presented in October 2025 in Recife, Brazil.
Since 2018, the LMI TAPIOCA has produced over 100 scientific publications thanks to ambitious projects and enhanced cooperation between French and Brazilian laboratories. The exhibition showcases this work, the fruit of fruitful collaboration between the countries and an integrated approach to marine science.
To know more
https://tapioca.ird.fr/terra-mar/
https://terramar.online/
https://www.ird.fr/conference-terra-mar-un-voyage-au-coeur-des-oceans-tropicaux
Contact
Arnaud BERTRAND, IRD Research Director, co-coordinator of LMI TAPIOCA
What will fishing and marine ecosystems look like by the end of the century? What will be the local consequences of our lifestyles, our relationship with the environment, and our political and individual actions? Researchers at the MARBEC laboratory have attempted to answer these questions. To do so, they designed and facilitated a participatory process to regionalise the reference scenarios used by the IPCC, through the co-construction of local narratives for 2100, adapted to the context of French fisheries in the Mediterranean and North Sea.
The so-called SSP-RCP scenarios are the result of various plausible socio-political and economic trajectories and give rise to different levels of climate change, resource exploitation and biodiversity health, as well as contrasting lifestyles and ways of functioning in our societies. To date, few studies have regionalised SSP-RCP scenarios for marine socio-ecosystems, and even fewer for the fisheries sector.
The study published in the journal Sustainability Science brought together a broad range of French stakeholders from professional organisations in the fishing sector, environmental associations working to promote sustainable fishing, and scientific experts specialising in the ecosystems studied. The stakeholders provided a solid foundation within the local contexts of the Mediterranean and North Sea, and for the first time, local narratives of SSP-RCP scenarios could be compared between different marine socio-ecosystems within the same country. The comparison of scenarios revealed major common themes (e.g. changing consumption patterns or the sector's energy transition) and specific and varied treatments of these themes depending on the socio-ecosystems studied (e.g. the great diversity of species fished in the Mediterranean or the saturation of North Sea waters by multiple marine uses), demonstrating the importance of obtaining projections at local scales. A standardised analysis of the emotions felt by participants during their projections within the scenarios reveals that the scenarios with the strongest environmental and climate impacts elicit a mix of emotions, dominated by sadness and anger. Recent work in environmental psychology suggests that feeling these emotions could promote behavioural change.
For long-term management purposes and in order to anticipate transformations and adaptations to ongoing global changes, future projections are important for decision-makers and all stakeholders in the marine environment. They are also of interest to the general public in order to raise awareness and mobilise action. The participants in these various projections and the team of researchers involved wanted to convey this information in the form of a short film, ‘Demain, la pêche’ (Tomorrow, Fishing), which immersively illustrates the life of a Mediterranean fisherman in 2101, based on local scientific narratives. In just two minutes, the short film presents two contrasting futures, two plausible visions of the future, and invites us to ask ourselves what kind of future we want. With the third United Nations Ocean Conference having just concluded in Nice, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, many are still waiting for political measures that are commensurate with the oceanic challenges of the 21st century.
Partnership and funding
Partenariat : IRD - Ifremer - Université de Montpellier - Yotta. Avec la participation d’étudiants ARTFX Montpellier.
Financement : Horizon Europe, France Filière Pêche ADAPT, The Pew Charitable Trusts, ACTNOW, PPR Océan et climat, LabEx CeMEB.
References
Chevallier, A., Banton, E., Moullec, F., Morell, A., Abello, C., Pita-Vaca, I., Peck, M. A., Ernande, B., Shin, Y.-J. (2025). Participatory downscaling of global SSP–RCP scenarios to local fisheries social–ecological systems. Sustainability Science 20, 817–836. Doi : 10.1007/s11625-025-01657-z
At the close of the "Assises Nationales des Données de la Recherche 2024", which took place on November 26 and 27 at the Mucem in Marseille, the Ichthyop software (https://ichthyop.org), represented by Nicolas Barrier (IRD, MARBEC) and Philippe Verley (IRD, AMAP) for the developers and Céline Barrier (University of Corse) for the users, received the “Prix science ouverte du logiciel libre de la recherche 2024” in the ‘Scientific and Technical’ category. The jury, chaired by Pierre Boulet (University of Lille), was particularly impressed by Ichthyop's use outside its original community.
Initially developed to study the dynamics of fish eggs and larvae for applications in the South, and in South Africa in particular, Ichthyop is now widely used for more directly applied problems, such as the study of virus dissemination from aquaculture farms, the tracking and collection of marine debris and pollutants, and even the reconstruction of the drift of the remains of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane.
This award, which recognizes projects and research teams working to develop and disseminate open source software, rewards the efforts of the scientific and technical contributors to the Ichthyop software, whether students, PhDs, post-docs, researchers or engineers. Many thanks to Christian Mullon, Christophe Lett (IRD, MARBEC), Philippe Verley and
Nicolas Barrier, who have been the main contributors so far, as well as to the many Ichthyop users around the world who enrich scientific knowledge through their work. A number of doctoral students from the South, trained in Ichthyop, continue to use the software for their research in their respective countries, in South Africa, Côte d'Ivoire, Chile and Brazil.
Ichthyop is a software program for simulating the dispersion of organisms by ocean currents, which can also be applied to other environmental issues such as the study of plastic drift in the ocean.
Launched in 2007, Ichthyop helps to better understand the ecology of commercial species with high economic stakes, and to implement marine conservation policies by studying the connectivity between marine protected areas, as well as to study the drift of non-living entities such as pollutants
and marine debris.
To know more
Prix science ouverte du logiciel libre de la recherche 2024
As part of its scientific outreach activities aimed at Cycle 3 schoolchildren (CM1, CM2, 6ième), UMR MARBEC commissioned Sophie BLAISE, an illustrator trained at the Émile Cohl school, to produce a comic strip presenting its research activities. Financed by MARBEC and the Labex CEMEB in Montpellier, LA BD MARBEC is available: https://umr-marbec.fr/la-bd-marbec/
