French National Institute for Agricultural Research

Last update: 27 July 2012

For 60 years now, INRA has been developing research in the areas of agriculture, food and nutrition and the environment, with an eye to social issues and a focus on excellence.

Our research is guided by developments in scientific fields and focuses on worldwide challenges related to food and nutrition, the environment and land use facing the world of agriculture and agronomics today. Challenges such as climate change, human nutrition, competition between food and non-food crops, the exhaustion of fossil resources and appropriate land management put agronomists in a position to generate compatible economic, social and environmental development. INRA produces fundamental knowledge that leads to innovation and know-how for society. INRA lends its expertise to public decision-making.   

INRA SAD-ASTER: Agro-Systems Territories and Resources   

The research unit's strategy is to understand the dynamics of farming system changes to support transitions to a better use of territorial resources. We analyse past and present farming system dynamics and the conditions for their transitions and produce individual or collective methodologies and tools to support agro-system transitions.

INRA SAD-ASTER is a SPOP partner

Julie Wolfahrt is a junior scientist at INRA with academic background in Agronomy and Geography. From 2006 to 2009 her research dealt with environmental impact assessment of agricultural practices and indicators development in vineyard (PhD 2006-2008) and in oil palm plantation (post-doctoral position 2009). Since 2009, she has been focusing on territorial dynamics related with biomass energy production issues, using crop location modeling and territorial scale scenario development based on spatial data mining and decision modeling.
Julie Wolfahrt INRA
SPOP contact Julie Wohlfahrt 
Master student in agronomic engineering sciences at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Agronomie et des Industries Alimentaires (ENSAIA, Nancy), Margot Moulin has been following the Agronomist program, speciality Agriculture and Territories Development (expected diploma in September 2012). She has oriented her professional experiences towards research projects (gap-year in Australia, 2010-2011) and is currently doing her final internship on farmers’ decisions rules and changes at the farmland scale, involving interviews, qualitative data analysis, SIG and conceptual modeling (INRA-SAD-Paysage in Rennes, March-August 2012).Futur Phd student, she will model oil palm production systems dynamics and produce spatialised scenarios of possible futures for oil palm production at a territorial scale in Indonesia within SPOP project (Starting in October 2012).
Margot Moulin  
   
54 years old, Agr.Ing. and Dr from Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon (France), Marc is working in INRA (French institute of agricultural researches) as « senior scientits » in SAD department (Science for Action and Development). In this pluridisciplinary department, he is in charge of co-management of the agronomists (42 researchers). After a Ph.D. on land management by farmers, his research activities are focusing on on land use dynamics, and more specifically on spatial organisation of cropping systems and land changes in mixed and agricultural landscape. He is a co-manager of an interdisciplinary research group (“Zone Atelier”) on Moselle watershed (18 research teams) and chairs the 3rd division of European Society for Agronomy “cropping system form farm to global scale”. As expert, he is a member of Scientific Council of Seine-Normandy watershed Comity, and president of the Scientific Council of Rhine-Meuse watershed Comity. He authored or co-authored 46 peer-reviewed scientific publications and 69 communications in international conferences.
Marc Benoît  
   
Céline has been an engineer at INRA, SAD department for 11 years. My background is Geography. She contributes to studies dealing with land use dynamics in sensitive watersheds at different scales (from 100 to 100 000 km²) by developing spatialised data bases of agricultural practices. Her work aims at i) improving data availability on actual agricultural practices for environmental impact assessment research teams and ii) finding new methods to characterize and take into account cropping systems’ diversity.
Céline Schott  

Last update: 27 July 2012