Internship: Modeling Cattle Herds in Native-Tree Sylvopastoral Systems

The French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) invites applications for a 6-month research internship within the Herbivores joint research unit (UMRH) located in Saint-Genès-Champanelle, France. The successful candidate will work on the SyLvA-Herd project, focusing on the adaptation of a farm-scale mechanistic model (SEBIEN) to evaluate sylvopastoral practices involving native trees. Responsibilities include organizing commercial farm datasets, parameterizing relationships between tree canopy density and livestock performance, and conducting scenario analyses to optimize greenhouse gas mitigation and climate adaptation. The intern will collaborate closely with an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers in France and Brazil.

• Organize, clean, and document empirical plot, herd, and climate datasets from commercial farms.
• Construct variables and scenario classes reflecting tree-canopy density and functional tree diversity.
• Adapt and parameterize relationships linking sylvopastoral structure to forage production, nutritional value, and animal performance using R or Python.
• Integrate and run algorithms within the SEBIEN farm-scale modeling framework to simulate greenhouse gas emissions and feed balance.
• Perform model evaluation by comparing observed and simulated values through graphical inspections and error metrics such as RMSE and R-squared.
• Conduct global sensitivity analyses to determine the parameters that most significantly influence model outputs.
• Simulate no-tree baseline configurations alongside various sylvopastoral management and climate scenarios to identify optimal trade-offs.