Diversity is seen as a public good and a factor of resilience for taking up the challenges arising from the agro-ecological transition of something, current climate change and the need to preserve biodiversity and global health (OneHealth). Plant diversity is therefore studied in its different dimensions: biological, adaptive, geographical, ecological, sociological and cultural, and for both its natural and cultivated forms. Various scales of time and space are considered: long time periods to understand the evolutionary history of species and how domestication impacts on diversity, or short time periods to study how agrosystems shape the organization of diversity (intensity and type of selection, seed systems, etc.), or to understand the adaptive trajectories of plant populations.

We use multi-disciplinary approaches combining genetics and genomics, evolutionary biology and ecology, the human and social sciences, as well as the political sciences. Our research relies on methodological developments for diversity analysis, predictive modelling, participatory sciences, such as approaches involving co‑construction and experimental evolution setups. The species studied cover a wide range of life history traits (annual and perennial forms, sexual and asexual reproduction, self-fertilizing and cross-fertilizing species). This diversity of studied species, along with the areas and systems considered (Mediterranean and tropical species, traditional and modern agrosystems), is an asset for taking a systemic approach to the evolutionary processes involved.