For the secondyear running, the City of Paris library network, in partnership with the Collège de France, is hostinga bimonthly event at the Marguerite Yourcenar media library (15th arrondissement) to discuss the major intellectual and scientific issues of our time. The " Collège de France : faire connaissance ! "seriesregularly invites a professor to a public meeting to discuss the issues raised by his or her research, and the profession and role of the researcher in contemporary society. Free admission, booking essential.
Emmanuelle Porcher, visiting professor at the Collège de France's Biodiversity and Ecosystems Annual Chair in 2023-2024, will givea lecture on Saturday 17 May 2025 at 11 h, entitled " Plants, pollinators and pollination, a balance in peril ".
The lecture will take place at the Marguerite Yourcenar multimedia library, 41 rue d'Alleray, Paris 15e.
While biodiversity is often understood as the variety of life forms, it is also characterized by the diversity of interactions between living beings : competition, cooperation, predation... The product of long coevolution, these interactions mesh the Earth's surface and make biodiversity the " living fabric of the planet ", which regulates its functioning. Today's biodiversity crisis involves not only the disappearance of species, but also the equally serious loss of interactions : the planet's living fabric is being stretched. Through a revealing study of the interactions between flowering plants and pollinators, this presentation will shed light on the progressive unravelling of this mesh essential to life on Earth, and suggest ways of reversing the trend.
Emmanuelle Porcher is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist ; she is interested in the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of plants and their conservation. She is particularly interested in the role of agriculture, climate change and interactions between plants and their pollinators. Much of her work is based on participatory science programs, which bring together researchers and citizens to jointly improve our knowledge of biodiversity. She has lectured at MNHN, École Polytechnique and Sciences Po.
Since 2020, she has been Director of the Centre d'écologie et des sciences de la conservation at the Musem National d'Histoire Naturelle, and in 2020 received the Prix Recherche from the Société française d'écologie et d'évolution. In 2023-2024, she has been invited to hold the Biodiversity and Ecosystems Annual Chair at the Collège de France.
These lectures, aimed at the general public, reflect the wide range of disciplines present at the Collège de France : history, economics, sociology, literature, but also biology, chemistry, mathematics and evolutionary sciences.
With this new event, the libraries of the City of Paris are fulfilling their mission to disseminate knowledge and combat misinformation by offering the public opportunities to decode and explore certain areas of knowledge in greater depth. The aim is also to open a window onto the world of research and how it works, and to bring Parisians closer to an exceptional institution, the Collège de France, which has been at the heart of the city's intellectual and scientific life for five centuries.
