The collaborative French-Chinese project ANSWER (Analysis and Numerical Simulation of Water Ecosystem in Response to anthropogenic environmental changes) was launched in March 2017. It is funded by the French Research Agency (ANR) and by the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
It is conducted by 5 French research groups : MISTEA, LEESU, LEMON, iEES, LBE and 1 Chinese laboratory, NIGLAS, in Nanjing. On the French side, the project is coordinated by MISTEA.

The increase in the occurence of cyanobacterial blooms threatens the ecosystem services provided by lakes and reservoirs worldwide.
In ANSWER , researchers of various fields are working together to develop an integrative platform for lake ecosystems modeling, which will include some tools of data management and knowledge representation, models and methods of analysis. The platform will be used for :

• the short-term simulation (weeks) of the development and the spatial distribution of blooms after a sudden change of C/N/P ratio (heavy rain, strong winds) ;
• the long-term simulation (decades) of the dynamics of phytoplankton communities subject to slow variations of the C/N/P ratio (increase of atmospheric CO2, reduction of the phosphorus concentration).

The models will be validated on data of different lakes and improved by integrating specific processes that will be experimentally studied.
Lake Champs-sur-Marne is one of the study sites of the ANSWER project. More details can be found here Site d’étude du lac de Champs-sur-Marne

Contact at Leesu : Brigitte Vinçon-Leite b.vincon-leite@enpc.fr
To know more please go to the Website of the project

• https://www6.inra.fr/anr-answer/