
The aim of the Cafotrop/Energia project was to make an inventory of bugs (Heteroptera) and springtails of the floor, undergrowth and canopy of...
Due to the measures taken by the government to prevent the spread of Covid-19, the museums, gardens and zoos of the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle remain close, except the Jardin des Plantes (Garden of Plants), the Arboretum de Versailles-Chèvreloup, the Jardin botanique Val Rahmeh - Menton (Botanical Garden Val Rahmeh - Menton).
We will inform you as soon as possible of the reopening procedures.
CaFoTrop, or Canopée des Forêts Tropicales (Tropical Forest Canopy), organises missions with the Muséum and aims to explore tropical and temperate forests, more specifically the extreme environment of the canopy, a new biodiversity frontier which is difficult to reach.
The aim of the Cafotrop/Energia project was to make an inventory of bugs (Heteroptera) and springtails of the floor, undergrowth and canopy of...
SW Australia 2013 was the third and final mission of the "The survivors of Gondwana" Cafotrop-Muséum project, after the Patagonia mission in Chile...
Pondoland 2012 was the second field mission dedicated to collecting insects under the "The survivors of Gondwana" programme.
"Les rescapés du Gondwana" includes three field missions on three different sites: Chilean Patagonia, South Africa and South West Australia.
The aim of the New Zealand field mission was to collect specimens of Aradidae and Tingidae bugs, as well as Micropterigidae...
The scientific objective of this mission was to draw up a preliminary inventory of Collembola and Heteroptera insects in the Nouragues Nature...
The Cafotrop/Energia/Muséum project has three strands corresponding to the three tropical forest field missions in three chosen sites in Gabon,...
The Cafotrop/Energia/Muséum project has three strands corresponding to the three tropical forest field missions in three chosen sites in Gabon,...
Twenty-five biodiversity hotspots have been unanimously recognised on land. They are mainly situated in tropical forests. These hotspots are the planet’s most endangered regions, even though their biological diversity and endemism rates are among its highest.
These 25 hotspots have been established based on knowledge about plants and vertebrates. Insects represent over 75% of the animal world (and over 55% of the entire living world) and have not been taken into account. They are little known because their diversity, size and habitats (floor and canopy) make them difficult to collect and study.
The canopy (the uppermost layer of the forest) is considered to be an extreme environment because it is hard to reach. In the wake of the development of Tree climbing, CaFoTrop has developed a gentle, inexpensive access method (Picart et al. 2014) which has made it possible to roam through these extreme environments and study their biological richness, particularly the wide variety of insects.
The project’s main objective was to supplement data on insects and extreme environments like the floor and the canopy with respect to the definition of hotspots. Efforts were focussed on highlighting the richness of insects in tropical forests, taking into account the different interconnected segments of the floor, the undergrowth and the canopy.
Today, the aim of the The survivors of Gondwana project is to study the evolution and distribution of insect groups in relation with the fragmentation of Gondwana, this supercontinent which included South America, Africa, Australia, India and Antarctica 150 to 200 million years ago.
The Cafotrop project is an ongoing project, given the scale of the task. The biodiversity studies are therefore limited to a few insect groups and a few sites for the moment. They now include temperate forests.
The main groups selected are:
The team is composed of:
5 researchers:
a climber:
and a photographer: