Thomas Spiegelberger is research director at Irstea (National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture) working on the impact of climate and land-use change on plant-soil interactions and its consequence on the resilience of mountain grasslands.
He is deputy director of LESSEM (Laboratory of Ecsoystems and Societies in Mountains) at Irstea Grenoble.
LESSEM, a pluri-disciplinary laboratory working in Social and Human Sciences, Ecology and Forestry, aims at responding to the necessity to better understand the relationship between Man and Nature.
Therefore, working in research on ecosystems on one hand, and on human dynamics on the other hand, our objective is to better understand and to analyse the changes and evolutions at interfaces between Man and Nature. Production of scientific knowledge, but also contributing to supporting public decision making, are our principal objectives.
Thomas is in particular interested in plant-soil interactions. For this he uses observational and experimental approaches and collaborates with modellers to understand the changes from the Middle Age to present day in order to anticipate future changes on grasslands and wooded pastures under environmental stress and the consequences on their stability.
Since 20010 Thomas Spiegelberger is a coordinator of the Zone Atelier Alpes labelled by the CNRS, National Centre for Scientific Research, and also labelled long-term socio-economy and ecology research platform (LTSER “ZA Alpes”).