Elisa THEBAULT she is a researcher at the Institut d’Ecologie et des Sciences de l’Environnement de Paris (iEES). Her research aims to study the responses of communities and ecosystems to global change, and to better understand the links between diversity, the structure of networks of interactions between species and the stability of ecosystem functioning, with a particular interest in better linking theoretical approaches to mathematical modeling with experimental or empirical approaches.

The consequences of diversity and food web structure on the stability of ecological communities have been debated for more than 5 decades. While the understanding of the relation between diversity and the stability of properties at community and ecosystem levels has gained from joint empirical, experimental and theoretical insights, the question of the relation between food web structure and stability has received almost exclusively theoretical attention. The lack of empirical studies on this issue is partly due to the fact that theoretical studies are often disconnected from the stability of natural ecosystems, and to the difficulty of describing and manipulating food web structure in the field. Here I will present results based on both theoretical food web models and data analyses of time-series of fish communities across France, aiming to investigate in parallel the relations between diversity, food web structure and the stability of ecosystem properties.