The Evo-Eco-Paleo laboratory (UMR 8198) is a multi-institute research unit hosting faculty and staff from the CNRS and the University of Lille. The laboratory was created in January 2015 through a merger between the Genetics and Evolution of Vegetal Populations (GEPV) laboratory and the “Paleo-ecology & Sedimentary environments” team of the Geosystems laboratory.

The scientific objective of the Evo-Eco-Paleo unit is to contribute to the advancement of knowledge on the origin and evolution of biodiversity and paleo-biodiversity, especially regarding the effects of environmental changes at different temporal scales. The unit comprises personnel skilled in genetics and genomics of populations, evolutionary ecology, paleontology, paleo-ecology and eco-immunology, and develops research integrating modeling approaches, experiments, molecular, phenotypic and floristic data acquisition, biostatistics and bioinformatics.

The main themes developed in the laboratory deal with: the evolution of reproductive systems in plants and its consequences on genome evolution; the evolution of paleo-biodiversity in relation to changes of the environment during the Paleozoic; the identification of acclimation or adaptation processes in populations of plants and marine annelids in response to recent global changes.

The unit comprises some thirty researchers and professors, around twenty technicians and engineers, and about twenty PhD students and post-docs. The unit is directed by Pr. Xavier Vekemans (Univ. Lille).