Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights

• The Euro-Mediterranean “3+3” project TREASURE, conducted by the team, has been renewed for three years.

• Our study of interconnections of chemostats with and without diffusion has revealed configurations that can enhance the performances of degradation of microbial ecosystems. The characterization of thresholds on input nutrient concentration and the role of diffusion for such improvements over simpler or well-known configurations are new results. This approach is based on an implicit representation of spatial inhomogeneity in modelling natural soil ecosystems, and brings potential applications for the waste-water industry [19] .

• This year the first models of population dynamics taking into account the demographic randomness have been proposed. The random terms in these models are not artificial superimposed on classical ordinary differential equation models but are derived from descriptions at microscopic scales with individual birth and death processes [12] . We also proposed some examples where this randomness, even at small intensity, can radically alters the qualitative behavior of the considered systems [40] .