Papers by Jean-François Molino
IAWA Journal, 2019
Tropical tree floras are highly diverse and many genera and species share similar anatomical patt... more Tropical tree floras are highly diverse and many genera and species share similar anatomical patterns, making the identification of tropical wood charcoal very difficult. Appropriate tools to characterize charcoal anatomy are thus needed to facilitate and improve identification in such species-rich areas. This paper presents the first computer-aided identification key designed for charcoals from French Guiana, based on the wood anatomy of 507 species belonging to 274 genera and 71 families, which covers respectively 28%, 67% and 86% of the tree species, genera and families currently listed in this part of Amazonia.
Species of the same genus are recorded together except those described under a synonym genus in Détienne et al. (1982) that were kept separately. As a result, the key contains 289 ‘items’ and mostly aims to identify charcoals at the genus level. It records 26 anatomical features leading to 112 feature states, almost all of which are illustrated by SEM photographs of charcoal. The descriptions were mostly taken from Détienne et al.’s guidebook on tropical woods of French Guiana (1982) and follow the IAWA list of microscopic features for hardwood
identification (Wheeler et al. 1989). Some adjustments were made to a few features and those that are unrelated to charcoal identification were excluded. The whole tool, named CharKey, contains the key itself and the associated database including photographs. It can be downloaded on Figshare at https://figshare.com/s/d7d40060b53d2ad60389 (doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.6396005). CharKey is accessible using the free software Xper², specifically conceived for taxonomic description and computer aided-identification.
Forest Ecology and Management, 2003
Reliable ecological information at the landscape scale is generally lacking for tropical rain for... more Reliable ecological information at the landscape scale is generally lacking for tropical rain forests, although extensive areas have been sampled by forest inventory to estimate timber resources. We used the data provided by a 12,240 ha managementoriented forest inventory in the lowland rain forest of French Guiana to document species/environment relationships and to characterise the spatial variation of the¯oristic composition. The forest inventory encompassed 22,023 trees larger than 7.5 cm diameter measured in 411 0.3 ha sampling plots spread over a systematic grid with 500 m  400 m spacing between plot centres. In each plot, all the trees above 37.5 cm diameter have been recorded, while the trees between 7.5 and 37.5 cm diameter have been recorded in smaller sub-plots. Each sampling plot was characterised using semi-quantitative ecological descriptors relating to topography, remnants of lateritic cuirasses, presence of hydromorphic soils, etc. Preliminary analyses revealed that most of these variables could be accounted for by topographical categories subdivided in relation to presence/absence of hydromorphic soils. However, stand structure, expressed by the distribution of trees in diameter classes, proved fairly independent on such categories.
Journal of Essential Oil Research
The essential oil from leaves of Clausena anisum-olens (Blanco) Merr. var. anisum-olens (Rutaceae... more The essential oil from leaves of Clausena anisum-olens (Blanco) Merr. var. anisum-olens (Rutaceae) is studied individually on 91 cultivated and wild plants. Main compounds in the oil were (E)-anethole and/or methyl chavicol, and their respective percentages were stable through time and cultivation for each plant. Variations in oil contents between individuals showed a distribution pattern of apparent genetic origin, with three chemovariants: “pure anethole” oil, “pure methyl chavicol” oil, and “mixed” oil (about 90% anethole—10% methyl chavicol).
The reliability of the taxonomic and botanical data is essential for the implementation of advanc... more The reliability of the taxonomic and botanical data is essential for the implementation of advanced research in agronomy, conservation biology, ecology or in any sustainable development project. The past decades have witnessed the continued decline in the number of ta xonomists. Likewise, non- specialists are having difficulty to access taxonomic data, resulting from a generally limited diffusion, e.g., to classical
Proceedings of the 19th ACM international conference on Multimedia - MM 11, 2011
This demo presents a crowdsourcing web application dedicated to the access of botanical knowledge... more This demo presents a crowdsourcing web application dedicated to the access of botanical knowledge through automated identification of plant species by visual content. Inspired by citizen sciences, our aim is to speed up the collection and integration of raw botanical observation data, while providing to potential users an easy and efficient access to this botanical knowledge. The result presented during the demo is an enjoying application where anyone can play to shoot fresh cut leaves and observe the relevance of species suggested in spite of various visual difficult queries.
Proceedings of the 1st ACM international workshop on Multimedia analysis for ecological data - MAED 12, 2012
ABSTRACT This paper presents a new interactive web application for the visual identification of p... more ABSTRACT This paper presents a new interactive web application for the visual identification of plants based on collaborative pictures. Contrary to previous content-based identification methods and systems developed for plants that mainly relied on leaves, or in few other cases on flowers, it makes use of five different organs and plant's views including habit, flowers, fruits, leaves and bark. Thanks to an interactive and visual query widget, the tagging process of the different organs and views is as simple as drag-and-drop operations and does not require any expertise in botany. All training pictures used by the system were continuously collected during one year through a crowdsourcing application that was set up in the scope of a citizen sciences initiative. System-oriented and human-centered evaluations of the application show that the results are already satisfactory and therefore very promising in the long term to identify a richer flora.
International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 2011
Detecting broad scale spatial patterns across the South American rainforest biome is still a majo... more Detecting broad scale spatial patterns across the South American rainforest biome is still a major challenge. Although several countries do possess their own, more or less detailed land-cover map, these are based on classifications that appear largely discordant from a country to another. Up to now, continental scale remote sensing studies failed to fill this gap. They mostly result in crude representations of the rainforest biome as a single, uniform vegetation class, in contrast with open vegetations. A few studies identified broad scale spatial patterns, but only when they managed to map a particular forest characteristic such as biomass. The main objective of this study is to identify, characterize and map distinct forest landscape types within the evergreen lowland rainforest at the sub-continental scale of the Guiana Shield (north-east tropical South-America 10 • North-2 • South; 66 • West-50 • West). This study is based on the analysis of a 1-year daily data set (from January 1st to December 31st, 2000) from the VEGE-TATION sensor onboard the SPOT-4 satellite (1-km spatial resolution). We interpreted remotely sensed landscape classes (RSLC) from field and high resolution remote sensing data of 21 sites in French Guiana. We cross-analyzed remote sensing data, field observations and environmental data using multivariate analysis. We obtained 33 remotely sensed landscape classes (RSLC) among which five forest-RSLC representing 78% of the forested area. The latter were classified as different broad forest landscape types according to a gradient of canopy openness. Their mapping revealed a new and meaningful broad-scale spatial pattern of forest landscape types. At the scale of the Guiana Shield, we observed a spatial patterns similarity between climatic and forest landscape types. The two most open forest-RSLCs were observed mainly within the north-west to south-east dry belt. The three other forest-RSLCs were observed in wetter and less anthropized areas, particularly in the newly recognized "Guianan dense forest arch". Better management and conservation policies, as well as improvement of biological and ecological knowledge, require accurate and stable representations of the geographical components of ecosystems. Our results represent a decisive step in this way for the Guiana Shield area and contribute to fill one of the major shortfall in the knowledge of tropical forests.
Ecology and Evolution, 2014
While studying ecological patterns at large scales, ecologists are often unable to identify all c... more While studying ecological patterns at large scales, ecologists are often unable to identify all collections, forcing them to either omit these unidentified records entirely, without knowing the effect of this, or pursue very costly and time-consuming efforts for identifying them. These "indets" may be of critical importance, but as yet, their impact on the reliability of ecological analyses is poorly known. We investigated the consequence of omitting the unidentified records and provide an explanation for the results. We used three large-scale independent datasets, (Guyana/ Suriname, French Guiana, Ecuador) each consisting of records having been identified to a valid species name (identified morpho-species -IMS) and a number of unidentified records (unidentified morpho-species -UMS). A subset was created for each dataset containing only the IMS, which was compared with the complete dataset containing all morpho-species (AMS: = IMS + UMS) for the following analyses: species diversity (Fisher's alpha), similarity of species composition, Mantel test and ordination (NMDS). In addition, we also simulated an even larger number of unidentified records for all three datasets and analyzed the agreement between similarities again with these simulated datasets. For all analyses, results were extremely similar when using the complete datasets or the truncated subsets. IMS predicted ≥91% of the variation in AMS in all tests/analyses. Even when simulating a larger fraction of UMS, IMS predicted the results for AMS rather well. Using only IMS also out-performed using higher taxon data (genus-level identification) for sim-
Science, 2001
The "intermediate disturbance hypothesis," which postulates maximum diversity a... more The "intermediate disturbance hypothesis," which postulates maximum diversity at intermediate regimes of disturbance, has never been clearly proved to apply to species-rich tropical forest tree communities and to local-scale canopy disturbances that modify light environments. This hypothesis was tested on a sample of 17,000 trees in a Guianan forest, 10 years after a silvicultural experiment that added to natural treefall gaps a wide range of disturbance intensities. Species richness, standardized to eliminate density effects, peaked at intermediate disturbance levels, particularly when disturbance intensity was estimated through the percentage of stems of strongly light-dependent species.
Remote Sensing of Environment, 2012
Journal of Tropical Ecology, 2011
... 2005), (3) high seedling survival rate (Henkel et al. 2005, McGuire 2007a, 2007b) and, potent... more ... 2005), (3) high seedling survival rate (Henkel et al. 2005, McGuire 2007a, 2007b) and, potentially, (4) slow litter decomposition (Mayor & Henkel 2006, McGuire et al. ... 1 Corresponding authors. Emails: [email protected] / daniel.sabatier@ ird.fr them from French Guiana. ...
Journal of Ecology, 2012
1. Niche theory proposes that species differences underlie both coexistence within communities an... more 1. Niche theory proposes that species differences underlie both coexistence within communities and the differentiation in species composition among communities via limiting similarity and environmental filtering. However, it has been difficult to extend niche theory to species-rich communities because of the empirical challenge of quantifying niches for many species. This has motivated the development of functional and phylogeny-based approaches in community ecology, which represent two different means of approximating niche attributes. 2. Here, we assess the utility of plant functional traits and phylogenetic relationships in predicting community assembly processes using the largest trait and phylogenetic data base to date for any set of species-rich communities. 3. We measured 17 functional traits for all 4672 individuals of 668 tree species co-occurring in nine tropical rain forest plots in French Guiana. Trait variation was summarized into two ordination axes that reflect species niche overlap. 4. We also generated a dated molecular phylogenetic tree based on DNA sequencing of two plastid loci (rbcL and matK) comprising 97% of the individuals and 91% of the species in the plots. 5. We found that, on average, co-occurring species had greater functional and, to a lesser extent, phylogenetic similarity than expected by chance. 6. We also found that functional traits and their ordination loadings showed significant, albeit weak, phylogenetic signal, suggesting that phylogenetic distance provides pertinent information on niche overlap in tropical tree communities. 7. Synthesis. We provide the most comprehensive examination to date of the relative importance of environmental filtering and limiting similarity in structuring tropical tree communities. Our results confirm that environmental filtering is the overriding influence on community assembly in these species-rich systems.
Journal of Applied Ecology, 2012
1. Considerable debate surrounds the extent to which tropical forests can be managed for resource... more 1. Considerable debate surrounds the extent to which tropical forests can be managed for resource extraction while conserving biodiversity and ecosystem properties, which depend on functional composition. Here we evaluate the compatibility of these aims by examining the effects of logging on taxonomic and functional diversity and composition in a tropical forest. 2. Twenty years after selective logging, we inventoried 4140 stems regenerating in logging gaps and adjacent undisturbed areas, and we integrated a database of 13 functional traits describing leaf and wood economics of tropical trees. 3. We found no differences in taxonomic and functional richness among habitats, but logging gaps had significantly higher taxonomic and functional evenness. 4. Logging also effected striking, long-term changes in both species and functional composition. In particular, the xylem density of recruits in logging gaps was 6% less than in unlogged forests, leaves were 11% less tough and had 6-13% greater mineral nutrient concentrations. 5. Synthesis and applications. Our results suggest that managers of tropical forests should limit overall surface area converted to logging gaps by creating fewer, larger gaps during selective logging, to reduce impacts on the taxonomic and functional composition of the regenerating stand.
by Claudia Baider, Edward Jimmy Alarcon Mozombite, Alexandre A de Oliveira, Milton Tirado, Cid Ferreira, Doug Daly, Italo Mesones, Roderick Zagt, Ademir Roberto Ruschel, Francisco Dallmeier, David A Neill, Tinde van Andel, Hernan Castellanos, Rodolfo Vasquez, César I A Vela, Flávia Costa, susan laurance, Uneg Hernandez, Stanford & Eglee Zent, Hirma Ramírez, Ligia Urrego, Jean-François Molino, Maria Mora, Marcos Ríos, and Lionel Hernandez Science, 2013
Journal of Tropical Ecology, 2007
A variety of processes have been identified as playing a key role in maintenance of hyper-rich tr... more A variety of processes have been identified as playing a key role in maintenance of hyper-rich tropical forest, among which ecological sorting caused by niche partitioning challenges stochastic dispersal processes. However, demographic responses to spatio-temporal resource variation 1 that could result in biased species distributions are still little studied. In this paper we investigate from two censuses, ca. 15 y apart, of a 12-ha permanent forest sample in French Guiana, how tree recruitment and mortality rates vary among hydrological soil types known to affect species habitat preferences and among ecological guilds related to species light requirement. The results indicate that both recruitment and mortality vary significantly with respect to these factors. While the mean instantaneous mortality and recruitment rates are estimated to 0.98 and 0.81%, respectively, pioneer species, canopy trees and hydromorphic bottomland soils depart significantly from these values. In particular, the pioneers, regenerating either from the soil seed bank or from post-opening seed rain, show faster dynamics than other species. These two guilds harbour probabilities of mortality elevated by a factor of 1.9 and 3.2, respectively, and probabilities of recruitment elevated by a factor of 4.9 and 3.1, respectively. Conversely, canopy trees show slower dynamics, with probabilities of mortality and recruitment lowered by a mean factor of about 0.5 with respect to other species. We also observe that trees growing in hydromorphic bottomlands prove to have significantly higher mortality and recruitment probabilities, by a factor of about 2 with respect to those growing in terra firme.
Annals of Forest Science, 2011
& Introduction Various processes contribute to shaping the local assemblage of species in hyperdi... more & Introduction Various processes contribute to shaping the local assemblage of species in hyperdiverse tropical forest. The relative contribution of environmental factors and dispersal limitation in determining the spatial distribution of saplings at local scale is unclear. & Methods We examined two types of environmental factors: (a) soil type reflecting drainage regime and (b) past logging damages reflecting light regime in a neotropical moist forest site. We used a logistic model to predict presence or absence of a given species in a network of elementary small plots. & Results The effect of mapped environmental factors and a spatial correlation term were jointly estimated providing a direct measure of the relative role of habitat specialisation and dispersal limitation. At community level, dispersal limitation was the most important determinant of species absence at local scale. The two environmental factors examined played a balanced role. Different species however showed different degrees of dispersal limitation and habitat specialisation. The distribution of a large proportion of species-the majority of the most abundant species-was significantly affected by at least one environmental factor. We provide a ranking of 49 species sensitive to canopy disturbance (from shade specialist to pioneer) and 41 species affected by seasonal flooding (either positively or negatively).
Talks by Jean-François Molino
Nos últimos anos, as pesquisas nas regiões central e oeste da Amazônia confirmam que as antigas o... more Nos últimos anos, as pesquisas nas regiões central e oeste da Amazônia confirmam que as antigas ocupações humanas tiveram um impacto no meio ambiente da região, incluindo a paisagem, os solos e a floresta. A partir dessas evidências, o projeto de pesquisa " LongTIme " foi iniciado na Guiana francesa com a finalidade de preencher a lacuna de informação existente na Amazónia oriental. Ao reunir pesquisadores das ciências humanas (arqueólogos, etnólogos) e das ciências ambientais (ecólogos, pedólogos), com colaboradores indígenas, esse projeto interdisciplinar se dedica a entender como as antigas populações influenciaram a biodiversidade florestal. A área de estudo se expande sobre uma ampla área (150Ha), no baixo igarapé Arataïe, e inclui vegetações diversas, como bambuzais, e um sitio arqueológico típico da Guiana, chamado Montagnes couronnées. Esses sítios se encontram no topo de colinas na floresta e são rodeados por um fosso antrópico que indicam ocupações massivas. Como são de difícil aceso, poucas escavações foram feitas até o momento e ainda pouco compreendemos sobre suas funções. Assim, a parte geoarqueológica de LongTIme se inspira nos estudos sobre as Terras Pretas brasileiras, utilizando a micromorfólogia com análises geoquímicas para definir os solos antrópicos da Guiana. Os primeiros resultados micromorfológicos destacam índices de atividades de desmatamento para abrir zonas na floresta (instalação de áreas residenciais ou agrícolas), de combustão (sistemas de corte e queima e/ou fogões) e de limpeza dos solos (gestão de lixo), o que nos permite localizar algumas dessas atividades na paisagem do igarapé Arataïe e iniciar uma reflexão sobre os usos do lugar. Estudos geoquímicos em curso propiciarão informações complementares quando os solos arqueológicos estudados possuíem um enriquecimento relativo em relação aos solos naturais. Em suma, esse estudo tem como objetivo secundário comparar os solos arqueológicos da Guiana com os arqueoantrossolos da Amazônia.
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Papers by Jean-François Molino
Species of the same genus are recorded together except those described under a synonym genus in Détienne et al. (1982) that were kept separately. As a result, the key contains 289 ‘items’ and mostly aims to identify charcoals at the genus level. It records 26 anatomical features leading to 112 feature states, almost all of which are illustrated by SEM photographs of charcoal. The descriptions were mostly taken from Détienne et al.’s guidebook on tropical woods of French Guiana (1982) and follow the IAWA list of microscopic features for hardwood
identification (Wheeler et al. 1989). Some adjustments were made to a few features and those that are unrelated to charcoal identification were excluded. The whole tool, named CharKey, contains the key itself and the associated database including photographs. It can be downloaded on Figshare at https://figshare.com/s/d7d40060b53d2ad60389 (doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.6396005). CharKey is accessible using the free software Xper², specifically conceived for taxonomic description and computer aided-identification.
Talks by Jean-François Molino
Species of the same genus are recorded together except those described under a synonym genus in Détienne et al. (1982) that were kept separately. As a result, the key contains 289 ‘items’ and mostly aims to identify charcoals at the genus level. It records 26 anatomical features leading to 112 feature states, almost all of which are illustrated by SEM photographs of charcoal. The descriptions were mostly taken from Détienne et al.’s guidebook on tropical woods of French Guiana (1982) and follow the IAWA list of microscopic features for hardwood
identification (Wheeler et al. 1989). Some adjustments were made to a few features and those that are unrelated to charcoal identification were excluded. The whole tool, named CharKey, contains the key itself and the associated database including photographs. It can be downloaded on Figshare at https://figshare.com/s/d7d40060b53d2ad60389 (doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.6396005). CharKey is accessible using the free software Xper², specifically conceived for taxonomic description and computer aided-identification.