GreenOwl is a joined Inria team with CNRS, Sorbonne University (LOV: laboratory of Oceanography from Villefranche) and INRAE (ITAP: Technologies and Methods for the Agriculture of tomorrow).

GreenOwl follows on from the BIOCORE project team.

Overview

Climate change  resulting from the anthropogenic activities will dramatically modify the composition and activity of aquatic microbial ecosystems on our planet. The first aim of Greenowl is to  assess the resilience capability of the microbial ecosystems to these changes. Taming adaptation of microorganisms is a second objective, for developing new energy sources, new protein sources, new ways to recycle carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. Finally there is a need to improve the  environmental assessment of the impact of these new technologies, and to quantify their long term benefits. Greenowl will deploy  theoretical tools, from the fields of automatic control, artificial intelligence and simulation and combine them with experimental validation on our experimental platforms, and through our partnerships.

Research directions

We focus on microbial ecosystems and adaptation capability, with a triple objective:
– Study, understand and tame the adaptation ability of microbial species and communities in a changing world
– Develop and optimize innovative microbial based processes to recycle energy, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus to reduce the anthropic impact on our planet
– Improve the methodologies to assess the impact on the environment of a product or service, and derive strategies to reduce this impact.

These three areas are interlinked and exchange models and data, notably via experimental data acquisition platforms.