Abstract
Human activities are the main cause of global changes with adverse impacts on all biodiversity, both terrestrial and marine. In this context, many countries, including France, wish to stop this problem by improving networks for monitoring and managing ecosystems using new methods and approaches that aim, in particular, to achieve good ecological status of their water masses. This is the main objective of this thesis project, focusing on a Mediterranean sentinel ecosystem, the Posidonia oceanica seagrass. P. oceanica is an underwater plant endemic to the Mediterranean, and an indicator of the quality of its environment. By linking its spatial distribution with biological data and anthropogenic pressures, it is possible to develop new indicators that are easy to measure at the scale of the entire French coastline (1800 km).Through a multidisciplinary approach, combining participatory mapping, analysis of old images and current ecological data, we have been able to identify the location of former P. oceanica seagrass that have now disappeared and quantify the extent of the decline (70% in 66 years for example in Agde and Rochelongue). Our results also show that the indices of landscape composition and configuration reflect well the state of conservation of a P. oceanica seagrass. Using these landscape indices, we have developed a new approach to define key conservation areas for the management of P. oceanica based on the influence of environmental variables and human activities. Finally, we have also shown that by degrading the P. oceanica seagrass, human activities favour the installation of invasive exotic algae, but can also act as a barrier to invasions by modifying local environmental conditions and making them unfavourable to invasive species.These results suggest multiple applications to improve the management and monitoring of the marine environment in the French Mediterranean.