2nd year (M1)

• Pre-specializations: Towards sustainable agriculture and Sustainable management of natural resources
• Specialization: Plant Sciences and Agroecology

3rd year (M2)

• Plant breeding, Mediterranean and tropical crops engineering
• Plant protection and environment

The department's teaching team also contributes to the Sustainable agricultural & food systems for the south (SAADS) Engineering programme through the module, "Ecosystems, agricultural and agri-food territories".

Furthermore, the Department of Biology and Ecology coordinates three second year (M2) specializations of the International Master, "Agronomy and Agrifood Sciences” (Master 3A):

• Agrodesign
• Selection and evolution of Mediterranean and tropical plants
• Plant Health

The department also coordinates two co-accredited Master programs:

• Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolution – Darwin Specialization with the University of Montpellier and
• Plant Health European Master, an International Erasmus M2 with the Universities of Valencia (Spain), Göttingen (Germany), Padova (Italy).

Thematic fields

• Plant production basics: understanding biotic and abiotic processes and interactions at different scales (from the genome to communities) to address major issues in crop production and associated changes in practices.
• Plant breeding: understanding the mechanisms leading to the diversity of cultivated plants in order to modify this diversity to meet the challenges involved in agroecological transition against a backdrop of global changes and saving/preserving resources.
• Plant protection and ecological engineering: understanding the biological interactions between plants, their pests and their natural enemies to propose plant protection strategies to reduce production losses by ensuring healthy products, limiting impacts, and contributing through sustainable production systems to ecosystem equilibrium, whether the ecosystem is highly anthropized or not.

Agronomic challenges

• Adapt plant varieties and plant management practices to global changes by studying their impacts on cultivated biodiversity and associated interactions (food chains, competition, parasitism...).
• Protect crops differently through the development of environmentally friendly pest control methods (i.e., biocontrol).
• Develop methods for managing biodiversity through agroecological approaches linking cultivated diversity (mix of species and varieties) and environmental production constraints (environmental law).
• Understand to predict by modelling plant phenotypes and genotypes in response to constraints, interactions between populations (pests and natural enemies) and their impacts in terms of management (i.e., epidemiosurveillance).