Post-Doctoral Fellowship in community ecology and modeling : Dijon, France

Grasslands support Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) dairy production systems. Their important biodiversity is a key component of the “terroir”, responsible for product specificity. For a sustainable development of PDO dairy production, ecological intensification of grassland use is a major challenge, particularly through optimal fertilization. A major concern is the impact of fertilizers (quantity and quality) on grassland and soil biodiversity and on the link of the product to its terroir. Taking the PDOComté cheese as a case study, IFEP will evaluate the impacts of fertilization practices (farmyard manure, slurry) on dairy production sustainability by an approach associating environmental quality of grassland ecosystems and the fluxes of useful microorganisms (“terroir effect”) and chemical contaminants from environment to milk. This innovative approach will help to better understand the determinants of PDOproducts specificity and to define optimal fertilization specifications for sustainable grassland management preserving cheese specificity and quality as well as ecosystem health.

The post-doctoral fellow will be involved in the analysis of microbial and contaminants fluxes from grassland to milk. The microbial community analyses on the different ecosystem compartments and especially on soil, will be performed by means of a metagenomic approach. Therefore, the post-doctoral fellow will have to handle all the bioinformatic and statistical analyses together with database management.