Abstract
Biological diversity constitutes one of the major pattern of ecosystem functioning, and a potential for adaptation and evolution of life in the context of climate change. As species are in many ways tightly interconnected, biodiversity loss can trigger large cascade effects and might lead to largely unpredictable consequences, reaching far beyond the visible reduction in the number or distribution of species. The high complexity of ecological organization is often a nightmare for decision-making, starting from accurately measuring biodiversity. This is however a necessary step to take if we want to prioritize action in biodiversity management, in order to preserve as much diversity as possible under limited resources. Though this thesis does not pretend to provide complete answers to those quite complex issues, it provides some reflection points for biodiversity management. It is composed of four chapters. The first chapter raises the issue of dealing with a mixed biodiversity, in which invasive species can be guests. It highlights the interconnections between the severity of the impacts of biological invasions and the contexts in which this invasion occurs. Considering invasion impacts as inherently ''ambivalent'' - i.e. good, bad or neutral for the system in which it arrives - we propose a typology to assess ambivalence in impact, based on the identification of potential sources of impact variability. For the second chapter, we focus on the measurement of biodiversity when accounting for species interactions, which we incorporates into the Noah's Arch problem developed by Weitzman (1998). We then derive a general model for ranking in situ conservation projects. We show firstly that, when accounting for ecological interactions, the problem defined by Weitzman is still an extreme solution, and secondly, that a ranking reversal is possible and completely defined by the interaction categories. In the third chapter, we use the in situ cost-benefit framework developed in Chapter 2 to compare the outcomes of two biodiversity indices, Weitzman's and Rao's. Those two indexes combine information about species survival probability, ecological interaction and distinctiveness in a different way to measure biodiversity; We analyze simple biodiversity protection plans for each index, and disentangle the role played by the different data requirement in the rankings, in a three species ecosystem. We show that such pieces of information will come as a trade-off when considered simultaneously in the measure, and that the introduction of ecological interactions among more than two species lead to more complex conclusions. Ecological interactions thus give important additional information to determine conservation objectives. Our last chapter is an adaptation of the previously defined optimization framework for the prioritization of invasive species management. It elaborates a myopic rule to determine which invasions must be controlled in priority, taking into account relative management costs and trophic cascades impacts. We discuss the gradient of the objective function composed of a diversity function W and a utility function U, to see whether we should retain several or only a few species for management under a budget constraint.