Christophe Botella is an Inria research fellow at the University of Montpellier and a member of the Pl@ntNet team. Having grown up in the Gers region, where he worked from an early age on his family’s forestry farm, he developed a fascination for plant diversity and the patterns it creates in landscapes. His background, spanning mathematics and the life sciences, led him to statistical ecology. This interdisciplinary field is driven by the digitization of biodiversity observations and citizen science programs, which generate massive and heterogeneous datasets. In his doctoral thesis, Christophe studied statistical biases in citizen observations used to map plants and proposed corrections for these biases. He pioneered the use of deep learning to improve and scale up biodiversity models—that is, to predict thousands of species at the continental level with high resolution and computational efficiency. These methods power tools such as GeoPl@ntNet for monitoring biodiversity and invasive species, in support of European public policies. His current research aims to fill the gaps in traditional inventories through citizen science observations, identify interpretable ecological mechanisms within the data, and quantify model uncertainty to integrate it into decision-making.
Christophe Botella is the recipient of the Collège de France Award for Young Researchers for the 2026 edition.