University of Avignon

About: University of Avignon is a education organization based out in Avignon, Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Speaker recognition. The organization has 1526 authors who have published 3766 publications receiving 88928 citations.

From the backyard to the backcountry: how ecological and biological traits explain the escape of garden plants into Mediterranean old fields

Abstract: To explain current ornamental plant invasions, or predict future ones, it is necessary to determine which factors increase the probability of an alien species becoming invasive. Here, we focused on the early phases of ornamental plant invasion in order to identify which plant features and cultivation practices may favor the escape of ornamental plants from domestic gardens to abandoned agricultural land sites in the Mediterranean Region. We used an original approach which consisted in visiting 120 private gardens in an urbanizing rural area of the French Mediterranean backcountry, and then visited surrounding old fields to determine which planted species had escaped out of the gardens. We built a database of 407 perennial ornamental alien species (most of which were animal-dispersed), and determined nineteen features that depicted the strength of species’ propagule pressure within gardens, the match between species requirements and local physical environment, and each species’ reproductive characteristics. Using standard and phylogenetic logistic regression, we found that ornamental alien plants were more likely to have escaped if they were planted in gardens’ margins, if they had a preference for dry soil, were tolerant to high-pH or pH-indifferent, and if they showed a capacity for clonal growth. Focusing only on animal-dispersed plants, we found that alien plants were more likely to have escaped if they were abundant in gardens and showed preference for dry soil. This suggests that gardening practices have a primary impact on the probability of a species to escape from cultivation, along with species pre-adaptation to local soil conditions, and capacity of asexual reproduction. Our results may have important implications for the implementation of management practices and awareness campaigns in order to limit ornamental plants to becoming invasive species in Mediterranean landscapes.

An abstract Nash-Moser theorem with parameters and applications to PDEs

Abstract: We prove an abstract Nash–Moser implicit function theorem with parameters which covers the applications to the existence of finite dimensional, differentiable, invariant tori of Hamiltonian PDEs with merely differentiable nonlinearities. The main new feature of the abstract iterative scheme is that the linearized operators, in a neighborhood of the expected solution, are invertible, and satisfy the “tame” estimates, only for proper subsets of the parameters. As an application we show the existence of periodic solutions of nonlinear wave equations on Riemannian Zoll manifolds. A point of interest is that, in presence of possibly very large “clusters of small divisors”, due to resonance phenomena, it is more natural to expect solutions with only Sobolev regularity.