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In his report to the president of the French Republic in November 2012 assessing France's return into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) military command structure, Hubert Védrine, the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, noted that France had no interest in leaving it again. His recommendations called for renewed action within the Alliance and the emergence of a European pillar. The timing should have been perfect, with France's draft White Paper on defence and security about to be published. However, at a time when budget cuts prevail, are these recommendations applicable and do they amount to more than just paying lip-service? This article focuses on a one-year period, from November 2012 to the latest debates around the Military Programming Law, reminiscent of Pierre Mendès-France's famous quote that governing is all about making choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technosols represent the group of soils whose properties and functions were defined by human action, formed from technogenic diagnostic materials. In this study, we use bibliometric techniques to investigate how environmental contamination has been addressed in global Technosol research and identify research trends that contribute to adequate Technosol management. We use 567 papers on Technosols from around the world available in the Web of Science database (2006–2021). Our results indicated that 34.2% of the global research on Technosols was related to environmental contamination, with significant growth over the years (R2 = 0.88). France was responsible for 29.8% of global research in contaminated Technosols. The main contaminant agents in Technosols were the heavy metals and the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), with a higher highlight for the first. Among the polluting metals, a greater concern was directed to the Pb, followed, in descending order, by the Zn, Cu, Cd, Ni, Cr, and As. The mining tailings were the main sources of the contaminant material. The combined effects of different pollutants, such as toxic metals and PAHs, in the biological community of Technosols and the combined use of environmental restoration strategies (phytoremediation and uses of organic compound, biochar, and biofertilizers) can be considered the main research trends in contaminated Technosols. Our results can be useful for research institutions and researchers around the world that seek development of strategies for the use and management of Technosols at the global level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many patients, notably among elderly nursing home residents, no plans about end-of-life decisions and palliative care are made. Consequently, when these patients experience life-threatening events, decisions to withhold or withdraw life-support raise major challenges for emergency healthcare professionals. Emergency department premises are not designed for providing the psychological and technical components of end-of-life care. The continuous inflow of large numbers of patients leaves little time for detailed assessments, and emergency department staff often lack training in end-of-life issues. For prehospital medical teams (in France, the physician-staffed mobile emergency and intensive care units known as SMURs), implementing treatment withholding and withdrawal decisions that may have been made before the acute event is not the main focus. The challenge lies in circumventing the apparent contradiction between the need to make immediate decisions and the requirement to set up a complex treatment project that may lead to treatment withholding and/or withdrawal. Laws and recommendations are of little assistance for making treatment withholding and withdrawal decisions in the emergency setting. The French Intensive Care Society (Société de Réanimation de Langue Française, SRLF) and French Society of Emergency Medicine (Société Française de Médecine d'Urgence, SFMU) tasked a panel of emergency physicians and intensivists with developing a document to serve both as a position paper on life-support withholding and withdrawal in the emergency setting and as a guide for professionals providing emergency care. The task force based its work on the available legislation and recommendations and on a review of published studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the association between family formation and the labour market trajectories of immigrants' descendants over the life course. Using rich data from the Trajectories and Origins survey from France, we apply multilevel event history models to analyse the transitions in and out of employment for both men and women by parity. We account for unobserved co-determinants of childbearing and employment by applying a simultaneous-equations modelling. Our analysis shows that women's professional careers are negatively associated with childbirth. There are differences across descendant groups. The female descendants of Turkish immigrants are more likely to exit employment and less likely to re-enter employment following childbirth than women from other groups. The negative impact of childbearing on employment is slightly overestimated among women due to unobserved selection effects. Among men, the descendants of European immigrants are less likely to exit employment after having a child than other descendant groups. The study demonstrates the negative effect of childbearing on women's employment, which is pronounced for some minority groups suggesting the need for further policies to help women reconcile work with family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on day-ahead electricity load forecasting for substations of the distribution network in France; therefore, the corresponding problem lies between the instability of a single consumption and the stability of a countrywide total demand. Moreover, this problem requires to forecast the loads of over one thousand substations; consequently, it belongs to the field of multiple time series forecasting. To that end, the paper applies an adaptive methodology that provided excellent results at a national scale; the idea is to combine generalized additive models with state-space representations. However, extending this methodology to the prediction of over a thousand time series raises a computational issue. It is solved by developing a frugal variant that reduces the number of estimated parameters: forecasting models are estimated only for a few time series and transfer learning is achieved by relying on aggregation of experts. This approach yields a reduction of computational needs and their associated emissions. Several variants are built, corresponding to different levels of parameter transfer, to find the best trade-off between accuracy and frugality. The selected method achieves competitive results compared to individual models. Finally, the paper highlights the interpretability of the models, which is important for operational applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By revisiting three empirical qualitative studies, the paper elaborates on conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to clarification of the use of the concept of politicization and "ordinary relationships to politics." The first study was conducted at the end of the 1990s on voluntary associations of young people of foreign descent in the French suburbs; the second was devoted to ordinary relationships to politics among young people in working-class neighborhoods in France; the third involves ongoing fieldwork examining non-profit organizations and their relationship to the state, focusing notably on evangelical non-profits in the Boston area of the USA. Although the research questions were different, they dealt with ordinary relationships to politics (ORP). This notion encompasses two dimensions. On the one hand, the idea that what determines one's relationship to politics is not only political, but also social: that we need to "embed" the study of relationships to politics into social dimensions. This is related to the study of the determination of relationships to politics. On the other hand, the idea that a relationship to politics is not only a relationship to the institutionalized political field, but that we need to adopt a broader definition of what politicization is, in order to grasp its ordinary forms, especially—but not only—when we deal with the working class. In this case, what is at stake is the definition of politicization. Nowadays, there is relative consensus in the literature regarding the determination of relationships to politics, but the definition of what politicization is remains much more controversial. In this paper, I present the terms of this controversy and the value in and limits of the various perspectives and, more specifically, I elaborate on how the changes in the type of fieldwork I conducted, in the national contexts, and the theoretical questions I asked impacted on the way I chose to define politicization. I suggest combining three definitions of politicization: (i) the legitimist or realist conception based on the relationship to the institutional political sphere; (ii) the conception of politicization as the identification of shared problems calling for collective solutions; and finally, (iii) approaching politicization as the readiness to be moved, to consider points of view other than those initially adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To reduce total test time and increase the efficiency of statistical analysis of a life-testing experiment adaptive progressive Type-II censoring scheme has been proposed. This paper addresses the statistical inference of the unknown parameters, reliability, and hazard rate functions of logistic exponential distribution under adaptive progressive Type-II censored samples. Maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) and maximum product spacing estimates (MPSEs) for the model parameters, reliability, and hazard rate functions can not be obtained explicitly, hence these are derived numerically using the Newton–Raphson method. Bayes estimates for the unknown parameters and reliability and hazard rate functions are computed under squared error loss function (SELF) and linear exponential loss function (LLF). It has been observed that the Bayes estimates are not in explicit forms, hence an approximation method such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is employed. Further, asymptotic confidence intervals (ACIs) and highest posterior density (HPD) credible intervals for the unknown parameters, reliability, and hazard rate functions are constructed. Besides, point and interval Bayesian predictions have been derived for future samples. A Monte Carlo simulation study has been carried out to compare the performance of the proposed estimates. Furthermore, three different optimality criteria have been considered to obtain the optimal censoring plan. Two real-life data sets, one from electronic industry and other one from COVID-19 data set containing the daily death rate from France are re-analyzed to demonstrate the proposed methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, the Paris Salon was the leading visual arts exhibition venue in France—and arguably in all of Europe. For an artist, having a painting admitted to the Salon was a good signal; obtaining one of the competitive medals systematically awarded at the exhibition often marked the start of a successful career. Based on two unique datasets, this paper quantitatively analyzes which elements drove the likelihood of winning a medal. The juried Salon system has often been criticized for being prejudiced. Our paper shows the changes in the way the jury acted as rules and regulations varied over time, adding a dynamic dimension to our analysis. We find that nepotism, proxied here as having one's master sit on the jury, helped win medals, but this was not systematically the case. The hierarchy of genres setting history paintings at the top was not always respected. By contrast, women were systematically discriminated against. Medals were more likely to be awarded to men, even for the minor genres, in which many women were forced to specialize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a rich literature investigates how and why NPOs use social media, research on why they differ in their social media adoption (SMA) is limited. In this paper we examine how NPOs' interorganizational partner portfolio characteristics can enable or constrain their adoption of social media, including blogs and videos, conventional social media (Facebook, Twitter...) and crowd-based platforms (crowdfunding and petitions). Based on a survey distributed to a sample of environmental NPOs in France, results indicate that NPOs having open networks, whose partners are physically distant, and that have more cross-sectoral partners have higher SMA. Network portfolio management can thus make up for a shortage of financial resources to invest in social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of the indoor classroom environment on students' learning efficiency. The research is based on a classroom smart monitoring and a questionnaire about the students' assessment of the comfort conditions and learning efficiency. Multisensor devices are used to measure the indoor temperature, relative humidity, and CO2 concentration at the students' desks. Data analysis concerned an investigation of the spatial and temporal variation of the comfort parameters and their correlation with students' assessment of comfort conditions and learning efficiency. The results show a significant spatial variation in the indoor comfort conditions, particularly for temperature and CO2 concentration. The indoor temperature could exceed by up to 5 °C, the temperature threshold limits value in France's public buildings. At the beginning of the class, the learning efficiency correlates well with the students' assessment of comfort conditions. At the end of the class, the results show a weak correlation with both recorded comfort parameters and the students' assessment of the indoor conditions. The results indicate a decrease in learning efficiency during the class. However, students do not mainly attribute this decrease to the degradation in indoor conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to propose a preferences representation model where ambiguity attitudes can be exogenous events or past experience-dependent. We adapt the Recursive Smooth Ambiguity model proposed by Klibanoff (Journal of Economic Theory 144:930-976, 2009) by introducing past experience described by a sequence of neutral events occurring up to the moment of the decision. These neutral events do not provide any information on the true process, but are likely to strengthen or weaken the decision-maker's ambiguity aversion degree by modifying emotions. Our model can explain some observed behaviors and market inefficiencies. We propose two illustrations. First, we provide a behavioral explanation for the decrease in influenza vaccination in France that followed the H1N1 crisis in 2009–2010. Second, we contribute to the broad literature on the annuity puzzle by introducing the impact of emotions on ambiguity attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar Photovoltaic (SPV) technology advancements are primarily aimed at decarbonizing and enhancing the resiliency of the energy grid. Incorporating SPV is one of the ways to achieve the goal of energy efficiency. Because of the nonlinearity, modeling of SPV is a very difficult process. Identification of variables in a lumped electric circuit model is required for accurate modeling of the SPV system. This paper presents a new state-of-the-art control technique based on human artefacts dubbed Drone Squadron Optimization for estimating 15 parameters of a three-diode equivalent model solar PV system. The suggested method simulates a nonlinear relationship between the P–V and I–V performance curves, lowering the difference between experimental and calculated data. To evaluate the adaptive performance in every climatic state, two different test cases with commercial PV cells, RTC France and photo watt-201, are used. The proposed method provides a more accurate parameter estimate. To validate the recommended approach's performance, the data are compared to the results of the most recent and powerful methodologies in the literature. For the RTC and PWP Photo Watt Cell, the DSO technique has the lowest Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 6.7776 × 10–4 and 0.002310324 × 10–4, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze how far-sightedness and risk aversion as well as the perceived trustworthiness of others correlate with COVID-19-related protective behaviors in France. We leverage individual-level data from the corona survey of the Survey of Health Aging and Retirement in Europe linked with a paper questionnaire survey about preferences conducted in France just before the coronavirus outbreak. Our results suggest that far-sightedness and risk aversion are strong predictors of individuals' protective behavior. More far-sighted individuals are more likely to not visit their family members anymore, wear a mask, and keep their distance from others when outside, wash their hands more regularly and cover their cough. Risk aversion increases the likelihood of not meeting more than 5 other people and not meeting with family members anymore. Concerning the perceived trustworthiness, we find that a higher level of trust in others reduces compliance with the recommendations about meeting with 5 or more people and family gatherings. We interpret this result as a sign that individuals with trust in others perceive a lower risk of being infected by friends and family members. Hence, they are more willing to take risks when they engage in social interactions when they perceive their relatives as trustworthy. The government should therefore consider individuals' heterogeneity in preferences and beliefs when implementing a strategy to encourage people to comply with its COVID-19 protective recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition a paper that was being published at the same time by a highly respected European laboratory, EFECTIS, authored by Eric Guilluame directly supports the results we obtained.[3] Babrauskus goes on to criticize the study by claiming that it does not accurately reflect the real environment. The corresponding author of the letter has questioned the independence and ethics of the testing laboratory and authors. [Extracted from the article]

This paper reanalyzes the determinants of the CO emissions in France. For this purpose, it considers the unit root test with two structural breaks and a dynamic ordinary least squares estimation. The paper also considers the effects of the energy consumption and the economic complexity on CO emissions. First, it is observed that the EKC hypothesis is valid in France. Second, the positive effect of the energy consumption on CO emissions is obtained. Third, it is observed that a higher economic complexity suppresses the level of CO emissions in the long run. The findings imply noteworthy environmental policy implications to decrease the level of CO emissions in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the consequences of the COVID-19 global health crisis on the fashion and textile industry in France. This crisis is only part of an already long, slow decline in the industry. The paper analyzes the composition and organization of textile industry. It offers data related to: sales, consumption, employees, company size, as well as imports and exports - all highlighting the importance of fashion and textiles in France today. The paper shows how lockdown has asphyxiated production and retail sales. COVID-19 caused the appearance of new challenges: mask production, new aspects of CSR in luxury textiles and the development of antiviral fabrics. Mask production can be considered as a case study useful in the analysis of textile challenges. In this context, the French textile industry should continue to improve on innovation and quality. Promoting labelling on the global market can help the sector to develop its high-end. France is credible to expanding its fashion and textile supply in luxury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on creative industries and the role played by the existing spatial distribution and agglomeration economies of these activities in relation to their entry decisions. We rely on employment and firm-level data in the creative industries (provided by INSEE) and compare the location of new establishments in the creative and non-creative industries between 2009 and 2013 in French departments (NUTS 3 regions). We use count data models and spatial econometrics to show that location determinants are rather similar in creative and non-creative industries and that specialisation in creative industries positively influences the entry of all other industries. The French case provides new insights to understand the geographical patterns of creative industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of high energy transients such as Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) as probes of the distant universe relies on the close collaboration between space and ground facilities. In this context, the Sino-French mission SVOM has been designed to combine a space and a ground segment and to make the most of their synergy. On the ground, the 1.3 meter robotic telescope COLIBRI, jointly developed by France and Mexico, will quickly point the sources detected by the space hard X-ray imager ECLAIRs, in order to detect and localise their visible/NIR counterpart and alert large telescopes in minutes. COLIBRI is equipped with two visible cameras, called DDRAGO-blue and DDRAGO-red, and an infrared camera, called CAGIRE, designed for the study of high redshift GRBs candidates. Being a low-noise NIR camera mounted at the focus of an alt-azimutal robotic telescope imposes specific requirements on CAGIRE. We describe here the main characteristics of the camera: its optical, mechanical and electronics architecture, the ALFA detector, and the operation of the camera on the telescope. The instrument description is completed by three sections presenting the calibration strategy, an image simulator incorporating known detector effects, and the automatic reduction software for the ramps acquired by the detector. This paper aims at providing an overview of the instrument before its installation on the telescope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how opioid analgesic sales are empirically related to socioeconomic disparities in France, with a focus on poverty. This analysis is made possible using the OpenHealth database, which provides retail sales data for opioid analgesics available on the French market. We exploit firm-level data for each of the 94 departments in Metropolitan France between 2008 and 2017. We show that increases in the poverty rate are associated with increases in sales: a one percentage point increase in poverty is associated with approximately a 5% increase in mild opioid sales. Our analysis further shows that opioid sales are positively related to the share of middle-aged people and individuals with basic education only, while they are negatively related to population density. The granularity and longitudinal nature of these data allow us to control for a large pool of potential confounding factors. Our results suggest that additional interventions should be more intensively addressed toward the most deprived areas. We conclude that a combination of policies aimed at improving economic prospects and strictly monitoring access to opioid medications would be beneficial for reducing opioid-related harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new practical formulation of the load-transfer P-Y curves to analyze the load–deflection response of a single pile under lateral loads is proposed in this paper. Parameters of the P-Y curves, namely the lateral reaction modulus and the lateral soil resistance, were correlated to the pre-bored pressuremeter (PMT) data as well as to the pile/soil stiffness ratio. A total of 16 full-scale monotonic lateral loading tests carried out in six experimental sites in France, representing a variety of soil conditions, were interpreted focused on the construction of the experimental P-Y curves along the test pile. For practical purposes, a methodology of construction of the P-Y curves was proposed. Moreover, the paper highlights the new concept of the critical deflection, which is the threshold of the nonlinear pile/soil response, as well as a classification of piles based on the pile/soil stiffness ratio. The process of validation of the proposed P-Y curve-based method was undertaken by comparing the predicted load–deflection curves to the experimental curves of several test piles within a medium-sized database, and a very good predictive capability was noticed. At last, the concept of the normalized load–deflection curve was introduced to estimate the pile deflection during a preliminary stage of pile design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether the increasing cooperation between municipalities in the 2000s in France favored firm creation and what type of intermunicipal cooperation was more effective. Results first show that a higher share of municipalities involved in cooperation is a significant and positive driver of firm creation. Second, results indicate that to favor firm creation, intermunicipal governments must rely on business tax sharing. Our findings are in line with first and second-generation models of fiscal federalism. Indeed, the lower tax competition is probably key to make fiscal integration conducive to firm creation. And local governments are more likely to provide market-enhancing public goods when they face the relevant fiscal incentives. Finally, we suggest that the two goals of the 1999 law (increased cooperation between urban municipalities and business tax-based sharing) were effective in boosting firm creation in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social entrepreneurship research remains largely conceptual and qualitative, which makes the comparisons with profit-seeking entrepreneurship difficult. This paper is an attempt to fill in this empirical divide. As such, we perform a statistical study of the characteristics of the social entrepreneurial city. Using a nationwide dataset on social venturing at the city level in France, and given the scarcity of labeled social ventures in the country, we define a social entrepreneurial city as one that count at least one of such firms. Our statistical analysis reveals that the social entrepreneurial city shares many common points with the entrepreneurial city: it is a large city, and with a diversified economy. There are also some major differences, as we find that social entrepreneurship emerges in places lacking of creative arts and entertainment options, and where the activity rate is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SEIR (Susceptible–Exposed–Infected–Recovered) approach is a classic modeling method that is frequently used to study infectious diseases. However, in the vast majority of such models transitions from one population group to another are described using the mass-action law. That causes inability to reproduce observable dynamics of an infection such as the incubation period or progression of the disease's symptoms. In this paper, we propose a new approach to simulate the epidemic dynamics based on a system of differential equations with time delays and instant transitions to approximate durations of transition processes more correctly and make model parameters more clear. The suggested approach can be applied not only to Covid-19 but also to the study of other infectious diseases. We utilized it in the development of the delay-based model of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany and France. The model takes into account testing of different population groups, symptoms progression from mild to critical, vaccination, duration of protective immunity and new virus strains. The stringency index was used as a generalized characteristic of the non-pharmaceutical government interventions in corresponding countries to contain the virus spread. The parameter identifiability analysis demonstrated that the presented modeling approach enables to significantly reduce the number of parameters and make them more identifiable. Both models are publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the impact of past mining on public safety. It emphasizes the need to understand the induced seismic hazard and consequently improve the post-mining management procedures and legislations, as many mining sites are located in proximity to populated areas. Due to many challenges and complexity of the post-mining environments, induced seismic hazard nowadays remains largely unknown. However, the return experience of several post-mining sites in recent decades have shown us that the mine flooding and/or degradation of mining works can lead to the stress perturbations, inducing the seismicity and the reactivation of the surrounding geological faults. Hence, it is important to advance the seismic monitoring and research of seismicity in flooded post-mining districts. As the number of mine closures worldwide is rising, it can be expected that flooding induced reactivation of the surrounding faults becomes a more often observed phenomenon. We present in this paper the experience of the abandoned flooded coal mine of Gardanne in France, which has been experiencing post-mining seismicity problems since its closure in 2010. We show the results of a recent study of seismic multiplets and clustering of seismic events, as well as their spatio-temporal activity compared to meteorological conditions. These results provide us new insights as well as lead to raising new questions on seismic sources and triggering mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of price variations over time and across space on search intensity and search time by consumers in retail markets for diesel in France. The main contribution of the paper is that existing work in industrial organisation in this area has already studied the effect of such variability on the first measure of search but not on the second one. Using novel data from daily consultation measures and price information from a government-run website, we find that price dispersion across space increases search activity and the amount of time allocated to search. Furthermore, while contemporaneous price changes do not appear to influence the number of visits and time per visit to the website, several coefficients on past price changes are positive and statistically different from zero. Our results thus suggest that price dispersion and price variability play a role in inducing search by current and potential customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of foreign visits by public officials on international trade. Using an original database that gathers more than 13,000 visits of French officials abroad and of foreign officials in France over the 1977–2007 period, it is shown that a bilateral visit to a foreign country is associated with an increase in French exports by 8% on average. This average effect hides considerable heterogeneity across world regions. The paper provides some evidence on the underlying mechanisms and finds that face-to-face visits mitigate trade costs related to contractual enforcement, insecurity and information. Indeed, analysis at the sectoral level reveals that visits increase French exports of a large variety of products, but that their effect is larger for differentiated products, i.e., goods highly exposed to contractual risks. Furthermore, bilateral visits reinforce trade, particularly in countries characterized by weak contract enforcement, corruption and lower political proximity with France, as well as by a smaller number of French migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geometric properties of exceedance regions above a given quantile level provide meaningful theoretical and statistical characterizations for stochastic processes defined on Euclidean domains. Many theoretical results have been obtained for excursions of Gaussian processes and include expected values of the so-called Lipschitz–Killing curvatures (LKCs), such as the area, perimeter and Euler characteristic in two-dimensional Euclidean space. In this paper, we derive novel results for the expected LKCs of excursion sets of more general processes whose construction is based on location or scale mixtures of a Gaussian process, which means that the mean or the standard deviation, respectively, of a stationary Gaussian process is a random variable. We first present exact formulas for peaks-over-threshold-stable limit processes (so-called Pareto processes) arising from the use of Gaussian or log-Gaussian spectral functions in the spectral construction of max-stable processes. These peaks-over-threshold limits are known to arise for Gaussian location or scale mixtures if the mixing distributions satisfies certain regular-variation properties. As a second important result, we show that expected LKCs of excursion sets of such general mixture processes converge to the corresponding expressions of their Pareto process limits. We further provide exact subasymptotic formulas of expected LKCs for various specific choices of the distribution of the mixing variable. Finally, we discuss consistent empirical estimation of LKCs of exceedance regions and implement numerical experiments to illustrate the rate of convergence towards asymptotic expressions. An application to daily temperature data simulated by climate models for the period 1951–2005 over a regular pixel grid covering continental France showcases the practical utility of the new results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role does nationality—or the image of a nation—play in how one thinks and receives scientific ideas? This paper investigates the commonly held ideas about "German science" and "French science" in early nineteenth-century France. During the politically turbulent time, the seemingly independent scientific community found itself in a difficult position: first, between the cosmopolitan ideals of scientific community and the invasive political reality, and second, between the popularized image of national differences and the actual comparisons of international scientific ideas. The tension between multiple sets of fictions and realities underscores the fragility of the concept of nationality as a scientific measure. A case study comparing morphological ideas, receptions in France, and the actual scientific texts of J. W. von Goethe and A. P. de Candolle further illustrates this fragility. Goethe and Candolle make an ideal comparative case because they were received in very different lights despite their similar concept of the plant type. Our sentence-classification and visualization methods are applied to their scientific texts, to compare the actual compositions and forms of the texts that purportedly represented German and French sciences. This paper concludes that there was a gap between what French readers assumed they read and what they really read, when it came to foreign scientific texts. The differences between Goethe's and Candolle's texts transcended the perceived national differences between German Romanticism and French Classicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to evaluating the causal effect of public policies on corporate performance, most studies tend to focus exclusively on targeted firms, as if these firms have no relationship to the rest of the economy. Yet, public policies are highly likely to influence non-targeted firms indirectly due to the relationships they have with targeted firms. This paper aims to fill this gap by evaluating the indirect causal effect of a new French cluster-innovation policy on the financial and employment outcomes of non-targeted companies. To do so, it focuses on French Technological Research Institutes, which are science-industry collaborations based on technology platforms that bring together SMEs, large companies, universities, and public research bodies with the goal of accelerating the transfer of knowledge towards firms and generating spillovers (indirect effects) inside and outside the scheme. Based on the literature on spillover effects and agglomeration economies, it can be assumed that industry-specific spillovers tend to be spatially concentrated. By comparing a non-targeted firm located in the NUTS-3 regions within which the policy was implemented (referred to as "treated regions"), to a non-targeted firm outside of these "treated regions", using a difference-in-differences method with fixed effects applied to panel data (2008–2016) combined with a double matching at the NUTS-3 region and firm level, we find that non-targeted firms located in the "treated regions" significantly improve their financial performance (turnover, financial autonomy) compared to control firms located in the NUTS-3 control regions. The dynamics of employment outcomes are ambiguous. A negative significant effect is observed on the proportion of managers at the beginning of the policy and a positive significant effect is noted later, at the end of the period of observation. An analysis of the dynamics of the effects indicates that performance does not improve immediately after the policy, but later in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency departments (EDs) have a key role in the public health system. They are facing a constant growth of their volume. Forecasting the daily volume is a major tool to adapt the allocation of resources. In this paper, we focus on pediatric EDs. They are specific by their strong seasonal variation, determined by the academic pace. The main contribution of this paper is to integrate the effects of this pace to the annual seasonality. We also tried out to improve the daily forecasting by forecasting the week means of the flow first. We trained and tested these models specifically on the pediatric EDs of Paris university hospital trust. For the eight pediatric EDs gathered, on average for the years 2016 to 2019, we forecasted the daily volume with a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 6.6% for a 7-days forecasting, 7.1% for a 14-days forecasting and 7.6% for a 28-days forecasting. Account of rhythm allows a performance increase, with results respectively 7%, 10.1% and 8.4% better relatively to a baseline model based on a periodic regression on the weeks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research to date has shown that HIV infection is a highly stressful experience for individuals, and one of the key adaptive resources after such painful experiences may be forgiveness. The aim of the present study was to examine the associations between dispositional forgiveness (assessed using Mullet's Forgivingness Questionnaire and Toussaint's Forgiveness Scale), perceived stress (single-item measure of stress symptoms), health perception (EuroQol visual analogue version of the scale) and life satisfaction (Satisfaction With Life Scale) in people living with HIV (PLWH) in France. Paper surveys were completed by 222 PLWH aged 18–78 (57% male). Multiple regression analysis revealed that sensitivity to circumstances, unconditional forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and forgiveness of others were significant predictors of health and happiness. Mediation analysis showed that these relationships are completely mediated by perceived stress. The present findings suggest that forgiveness and perceived stress may be important variables for healing in PLWH. Interventions designed to improve forgiveness and self-forgiveness may result in improved health and life satisfaction in PLWH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk can represent an important non-monetary barrier to the adoption of climate change mitigation practices. This paper deals with how risk aversion influences the fertilization behavior of farmers. We analytically show that a decreasing variance of yield along with nitrogen inputs encourages risk averse farmers to apply larger quantities of fertilizers. Data concerning three departments in France are then used to determine (i) crop yield response function to N fertilizer and (ii) farmers' risk aversion behavior on the basis of their current fertilizer applications. We find that risk aversion is associated with an additional application of 29 kg/ha compared with risk neutral behavior, which represents an average loss of €76/ha. We show that the reduction of an abatement linked to risk aversion should appear only when crop yield variance is convex with respect to N fertilizer. Lastly, our results show that an insurance contract that covers yield variability may be an interesting tool to mitigate emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to apply the Zenga distribution for equivalent disposable income from the last two waves of European Quality of Life Surveys for Germany and France (both for total society and selected socio-economic groups) and to assess the goodness of fit to empirical data. The Zenga distribution has not been used to describe the income distribution in these countries yet. The obtained parameters were assessed for fitting to empirical data using two measures—the Wasserstein-Kantorovich and the Wasserstein-Kantorovich standardized measure. The analysis of the results received allows for the conclusion that the Zenga distribution can fit the income distributions both for small as well as large values. It was also shown that the Zenga distribution fits the data well even with small and very small samples. The article uses a new measure to assess the fit of the distribution to empirical data, based on the Wasserstein-Kantorovich measure assessing the distance between the empirical and theoretical cumulative distribution function. The modification consisted in standardizing the Wasserstein-Kantorovich measure by dividing the field between distributors by the rectangle area, where length is maximum income and width is maximum value of the cumulative distribution function. The proposed measure is not sensitive to extreme values, often found in the analysis of income distribution, and can be applied even in very small samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the factors that affect location decisions of multinational firms in the French regions in terms of the type of organizational structure and location characteristics. The objective is to examine the significance of the factors that affect firms' choice of location and the operations in different locations. The paper considers the manufacturing and service sectors that differ in terms of nature of products and operations. This paper uses firm-level data extracted from "Bilan France" database. The database contains 6840 investment projects that cover the period from 2001 to 2011. The firms included in the database originate from 77 foreign countries. The study utilizes the properties of mixed logistic regression and nested logit to fulfill the objectives of the paper. The results show that (a) the organizational structure of projects in the French regions is not a random process, that is, coordination and communication costs matter for multinational firms, (b) multinational firms are willing to group their projects geographically in the same region, (c) the organizational structure of multinational corporations in France matters for the location decision of their new projects more than the regional characteristics, (d) the concentration of projects is more strategic for the manufacturing sector relative to the service sector, (e) internal coordination costs and the effect of stages (upstream and downstream) are more sensitive in the manufacturing sector. Having agreed upon in the literature that location decisions are country specific, this study offers robust evidence that multinational corporations in France adjust organizational structure and take into consideration regional characteristics in order to benefit from economies of scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, French citizens are prosecuted for the 'crime of solidarity': hosting undocumented migrants in defiance of state laws forbidding it (and subsequently named 'solidarity delinquents'). This paper explores contemporary 'crimes of solidarity' by investigating why indignant subjects defy the state and, in so doing, constitute themselves as citizens. Drawing on the concepts of hospitality and governmentality, the paper examines France's vexed relation with hospitality alongside a particular mode of governing the state as a home ('domopolitics') in relation to citizenship and migrancy. Hospitality as a governmentality rationalises processes of classification and identification that determine which mobile presences in the home are least disruptive to its social and moral order. Yet French 'solidarity delinquents' are savvy to the instrumentalisation and politicisation of hospitality. I show they too have a use for politicising hospitality and themselves. Mobilising these ideas through Isin's (2008) 'acts of citizenship' framework, I capture a citizenly response to domopolitical rule: hospitality becomes the terrain upon which republican citizens demonstrate liberté, égalité and especially fraternité, will not be suspended in the home. More broadly, the hospitality and citizen identity that is at present claimed must be seen in one crucial respect: state and dissident see in hospitality a tactic for realising a conception of Frenchness and citizenship, albeit in two competing, and perhaps irreconcilable, ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a pseudo-panel approach to examine household electricity demand behavior through the household life cycle and its response to income variations to help strengthen the energy policy-making process. Our empirical methodology is based on three rich independent microdata surveys (the National Housing Surveys), which are representative of the French housing sector. The resulted sample covers the 2006–2016 period. Using within estimations, this paper finds striking evidence that the income elasticity of French residential electricity demand is 0.22, averaged over our four cohorts of generations. In light of other works, our estimate stands in the lower range. The empirical results also show that residential electricity consumption follows an inverted U-shaped distribution as a function of the age of the household's head. Most notably, it appears that households at the mid-point of their life cycle are relatively the largest consumers of electricity. This outcome has important implications for policy-making. Any public policy aimed at reducing household energy consumption should consider this differentiation in consumption according to the position of households over the life cycle, and therefore target as priority households at the highest level of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Reducing the environmental impacts of food systems has become a growing concern for public authorities. This study aims to adapt the territorial LCA framework (T-LCA) to local food system assessment to identify territorial hotspots of a food system in relation to its land use functions. To achieve this goal, the T-LCA must be enhanced by overcoming previously exposed limitations. Methods: Deriving from the T-LCA framework, the methodology used in this paper assesses all territorial food-producing, processing, and consuming activities. The methodological developments suggest addressing its three principal methodological limitations by (i) using agricultural statistics to estimate the local consumption and thus account for intra-territorial flows, (ii) proposing novel agri-food land use functions related to a local food system, and (iii) developing a simplified framework for sensitivity analysis (SA) through detection of the most uncertain and influential data followed by a once-at-a-time (OAT) approach to improve the uncertainty related to the substantial number of data involved in meso-level LCAs. The methodology is applied to a case study in France using the Environmental Footprint (EF) 3.0 method. Results and discussion: The results indicate that intra-territorial flow analysis effectively distinguishes between local and imported flows, identifying their primary environmental hotspots. Despite the significant impact of imported flows, export-oriented livestock production emerges as the principal hotspot of the studied food system. Integrating agri-food land use functions into LCA is crucial for linking the activities with higher environmental impact contributions and their territorial functions. This is the case of animal husbandry which is the main environmental hotspot and one of the principal local economic activities. Finally, the sensitivity analysis reveals a low sensitivity of the overall results to the most influential and uncertain parameters. Conclusions: These findings confirm the interest in further developing territorial LCA methodologies and adapting them to various contexts to determine the principal environmental burdens of local systems and improve territorial land planning. This study also proposes various research perspectives to confirm and enhance the robustness of T-LCA frameworks, including the development of regional life cycle inventories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fradkin and Seymour (J Comb Theory Ser B 110:19–46, 2015) defined the class of digraphs of bounded independence number as a generalization of the class of tournaments. They argued that the class of digraphs of bounded independence number is structured enough to be exploited algorithmically. In this paper, we further strengthen this belief by showing that several cut problems that admit sub-exponential time parameterized algorithms (a trait uncommon to parameterized algorithms) on tournaments, including Directed Feedback Arc Set, Directed Cutwidth and Optimal Linear Arrangement, also admit such algorithms on digraphs of bounded independence number. Towards this, we rely on the generic approach of Fomin and Pilipczuk (in: Proceedings of the Algorithms—ESA 2013—21st Annual European Symposium, Sophia Antipolis, France, September 2–4, 2013, pp. 505–516, 2013), where to get the desired algorithms, it is enough to bound the number of k-cuts in digraphs of bounded independence number by a sub-exponential FPT function (Fomin and Pilipczuk bounded the number of k-cuts in transitive tournaments). Specifically, our main technical contribution is a combinatorial result that proves that the yes-instances of the problems (defined above) have a sub-exponential number of k-cuts. We prove this bound by using a combination of chromatic coding, inductive reasoning and exploiting the structural properties of these digraphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Dynamic LCIA has been developed in the past 12 years almost exclusively for climate change impact assessment, and especially the Global Warming Potential (GWP) indicator. Recently, discussions have taken place in France on the issue of integrating, a dynamic GWP indicator in the 2020 regulation (noted RE2020) on new buildings. This regulation uses a combination of static and dynamic indicators. Discussions to produce a standard on a dynamic GWP indicator could be soon launched at European level. This close perspective of using dynamic indicator into regulation recalls the importance using scientifically sound indicators. Therefore, this article re-examines the fundamentals concepts of the dynamic GWP indicator on which the future regulation is based. Method: Three basic principles of LCA are recalled: (i) no inventory flow should be omitted from an assessment, (ii) all impacts of all substances contributing to an impact category should have the same Time Horizon of the Impact (THI) in the indicator used for that impact category, and (iii) the time horizon of the impact has no reason to change as a function of time. It is then shown that the current and common version of the dynamic GWP (Levasseur et al. 2010) does not respect these principles. A new expression of dynamic GWP is provided in order to respect the three basic principles. Results: Both dynamic GWP indicators are compared according to their meaning and according to the decrease that they quantify compared to static GWP. The initial dynamic GWP indicator (Levasseur et al. 2010) sets a fixed Time of Observation Duration (TOD), chosen subjectively, after which nor flows nor impacts on climate change are assessed. The new dynamic GWP sets a TOD according to the life cycle duration (LCD) and the THI that avoids any flow omission and guarantees the full account of the impact of all flows. THI and LCD have independent values, but both time entities are related chronologically: THI has to be considered to account for the full effect for the very last emission of the product's life cycle. Thus, the total observation duration (TOD) to consider for any dynamic approach is TOD = LCD + THI. The initial dynamic indicator overestimates the effect of temporary carbon storage of around 25% at the time 50 years. The raised issue is not only an implementation issue due to the choice of TOD, it is a conceptual issue, because even in the case of TOD > LCD, the value of THI would still be variable according to the moment of emissions. Finally, the notation between dynamic and static GWP is not harmonised which can lead to confusion. Conclusion: The initial GWP indicator (Levasseur et al. 2010) represents an assessment of the impact within a subjectively chosen observation period and neither the flows nor the effects of these flows on climate change are taken into account beyond this limit. The new equation provided for the dynamic indicator takes into account the totality of the flows and the entireness of their impact according to the value of THI; it thus represents only and exclusively the effect of delaying emissions compared to the static GWP. This new method is totally applicable for the regulation, as only new FRE2020(t) coefficients, produced in this paper, have to be changed. At a time when the dynamic GWP indicator is being considered as a regulatory tool on a French or even European scale, it seems crucial to consider its scientific relevance, because using the wrong method could lead to an overestimation of the possible beneficial effects of temporary carbon storage in the construction sector as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plant-atmosphere exchange fluxes of CO2 measured with the Eddy covariance method are used extensively for the assessment of ecosystem carbon budgets worldwide. The present paper describes eddy flux measurements for a managed upland grassland in Central France studied over two decades (2003–2021). We present the site meteorological data for this measurement period, and we describe the pre-processing and post-processing approaches used to overcome issues of data gaps, commonly associated with long-term EC datasets. Recent progress in eddy flux technology and machine learning now paves the way to produce robust long-term datasets, based on normalised data processing techniques, but such reference datasets remain rare for grasslands. Here, we combined two gap-filling techniques, Marginal Distribution Sampling (short gaps) and Random Forest (long gaps), to complete two reference flux datasets at the half-hour and daily-scales respectively. The resulting datasets are valuable for assessing the response of grassland ecosystems to (past) climate change, but also for model evaluation and validation with respect to future global change research with the carbon-cycle community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent years, fire departments started to build databases containing detailed information about their interventions during fires, road accidents, and other types of incidents. Their goal is to invest this information using data analysis methods in order to better understand the trends of certain events. This could help them enhance the management of their allocated resources, which leads to a reduction in the operational costs, increase in efficiency and the overall intervention speed. Therefore, in this research paper, we investigate the possibility of predicting future incidents using machine learning algorithms that are trained on a set of data containing information on almost 200,000 interventions that happened during the last 6 years. These data, provided by the fire department in the region of Doubs, France, were not sufficient to detect patterns. Thus, we have imported additional information from external resources that we thought it would improve the accuracy of the predictions. Finally, we tested multiple machine learning algorithms and we compared their results, aiming to determine which algorithm performs better. The results look promising as we were able to predict the number of interventions for each 3 hours block for a whole year, with an acceptable error margin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion piece, eight scholars in geography, urban planning, and agri-food studies from the United States (US) and France engage in a bi-national comparison to deepen our collective understanding of food and land justice. We specifically contextualize land justice as a critical component of food justice in both the US and France in three key areas: access to land for cultivation, urban agriculture, and non-agricultural forms of food provisioning. The US and France are interesting cases to compare, considering the differences and similarities in their colonial and agricultural histories, persistent and systemic race and class-based inequities in land access, and the roles of public bodies and social movements. In this paper, we synthesize literature, share reflections, and offer directions for future scholarship, including a broader comparative research agenda. An important difference we found is in the degree of scholarly attention to race and how it mediates access to land. We also observe that few scholars articulate a clear definition of justice in their work, nor do they share a common justice framework. We hope that this paper contributes to a more robust food and land justice framework for the use of scholars, practitioners and activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presented in this paper concerns the design and evaluation of curriculum material that supports mathematics teachers' understanding and enactment of reform curricula and innovative teaching practices. Our focus is on curriculum material supporting mathematics teachers' practices combining the use of digital technology and the development of student autonomy. We refer to the theoretical framework of the Documentational Approach to Didactics, which considers teachers' documentation work as a central lever for the evolution of teachers' practices. Our study took place in the context of curriculum reforms in France, which called on teachers to combine the use of digital technology with the development of student autonomy in their practices. We investigate in this paper the design of a meta-resource with the aim of supporting teachers' documentation work in this context. The documentation work ranged from choosing a lesson plan offered on a website to designing a completely new lesson. Using a design research approach, we conducted two design and evaluation cycles, involving different groups of researchers and teachers, and we analysed these design processes and their outcomes. The researchers used particular categories to distinguish between different forms of autonomy, and criteria concerning the articulation between student autonomy and digital technologies. The teachers provided elements concerning the features of a lesson plan facilitating its appropriation, and more generally related to their actual design work. Our results illustrate how a multidisciplinary team of researchers can collaborate with teachers to design 'meta-resources' supporting teachers' documentation work in a context of education reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the philanthropic behaviour of companies listed on four stock markets: the IBEX 35 (Spain), CAC-40 (France), DAX-30 (Germany) and AEX-25 (Netherlands). A bibliometric method was used to obtain keywords related to corporate philanthropy in literature, while a qualitative content analysis was undertaken to obtain specific philanthropy-related words from company annual reports. 19 groups of words (codes) were defined, indicating the terms used by companies to express corporate philanthropy and community involvement, the forms they use to express such involvement, and the formulas chosen to channel their aid. The word analysis also gave information about the stakeholders that companies take into account when they become involved in community issues. Different hypotheses were stated to determine whether the use of words was related to country, firm size (revenues and employees) or industry. The use of probit regression also allowed us to obtain combinations of these variables that explained the probability of using every term together but not separately. The results indicated that the variables which most affected philanthropic codes were country and revenues. Conversely, the variables which least influenced philanthropic codes were number of employees and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For audiovisual network operators, end-users satisfaction is a major issue. This is the case for TDF who operates a nationwide network in France whose main purpose is to carry Digital Terrestrial Television streams. Such audiovisual content is forwarded through multicast real-time streams which require continuity of service. Therefore, the main goal of this work is to define a new architecture to prevent impact during network healing time. The proposed architecture aims to use a pair of redundant multicast trees, and ensure their seamless resiliency. This architecture called "Seamless Multicast" takes advantage of the network-end equipment's ability to receive and combine two identical streams, complete or not. The main contribution of this paper is the development and evaluation of an algorithm for the computation of a pair of multicast trees and the associated hitless deployment scheme. Implementation requires an Software-Defined Networking architecture, in which performance knowledge and bandwidth management are centralized in a controller. A proof of concept controller has been used for validation of the architecture's global behaviour using a virtualized environment in multiple scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study that draws upon a collaborative research strategy and has two main objectives: 1) Translating and adapting into French the Measure of Victim Empowerment Related to Safety (MOVERS scale) (Goodman et al. Psychology of Violence, 5(4), 355-366, 2015a); 2) Validating the French version of the MOVERS scale in a population of French-Canadian women receiving shelter services. The French-Canadian MOVERS (FCM) was administered to 189 women receiving shelter services in the province of Québec (Canada). The factorial structure, reliability and validity of the FCM were tested. This paper highlights that the FCM replicates the three dimensions found in the original version (Goodman et al. Psychology of Violence, 5(4), 355-366, 2015a), displays significant correlations with measures of depression, anxiety and stress, self-esteem, perceived social support, satisfaction with life and self-efficacy, and has overall good reliability estimates. The FCM is a valid and reliable scale to assess safety-related empowerment among women receiving shelter services. Furthermore, the scale provides interesting opportunities to shelter workers, which will be discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Documenting trends in the health impacts of ambient temperature is key to supporting adaptation strategies to climate change. This paper explores changes in the temperature-related mortality in 18 French urban centers between 1970 and 2015. Method: A multicentric time-series design with time-varying distributed lag nonlinear models was adopted to model the shape of the relationship and assess temporal changes in risks and impacts. Results: The general shape of the temperature-mortality relationship did not change over time, except for an increasing risk at very low percentiles and a decreasing risk at very high percentiles. The relative risk at the 99.9th percentile compared to the 50th percentile of the 1970–2015 temperature distribution decreased from 2.33 [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.95:2.79] in 1975 to 1.33 [95% CI: 1.14:1.55] in 2015. Between 1970 and 2015, 302,456 [95% CI: 292,723:311,392] deaths were attributable to non-optimal temperatures, corresponding to 5.5% [95% CI: 5.3:5.6] of total mortality. This burden decreased progressively, representing 7.2% [95% CI: 6.7:7.7] of total mortality in the 1970s to 3.4% [95% CI: 3.2:3.6] in the 2000s. However, the contribution of hot temperatures to this burden (higher than the 90th percentile) increased. Discussion: Despite the decreasing relative risk, the fraction of mortality attributable to extreme heat increased between 1970 and 2015, thus highlighting the need for proactive adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of earnings management practices on firm performance and focuses on how economic policy uncertainty (EPU) moderates the association between earnings management and firm performance. The analysis is based on a sample of French listed companies on the CAC ALL tradable index for the period from 2010 to 2017. Our results show that earnings management is positively associated with firm performance. This finding suggests that accrual- based earnings management, real earnings management and classification shifting are beneficial when managers use accounting choices to reduce agency costs and create value for shareholders. We also find that high EPU triggers a credible signal of lower disclosure quality. It plays an important role in promoting the opportunistic use of earnings management, which harms firm performance. This study is interesting for potential investors, since it underlines the negative effect of managerial opportunistic behaviour on firm performance under policy uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The magnitudes recorded in seismic catalogues are subject to uncertainties that can have a significant impact when estimating the parameters of seismic recurrence models. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach based on a Poisson point process of dimension 2 that models both the magnitude hazard and the associated uncertainty. We define estimators of the parameters of the Gutenberg Richter model that maximize the likelihood of the data. We apply the approach to the Alps region in France and we compare it to other approaches proposed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elevated nitrate from human activity causes ecosystem and economic harm globally. The factors that control the spatiotemporal dynamics of riverine nitrate concentration remain difficult to describe and predict. We analyzed nitrate concentration from 4450 sites throughout France to group sites that exhibit similar trend and seasonal behaviors during 2010–2017 and relate these dynamics to catchment characteristics. We employed a latent-variable, Bayesian mixture of harmonic regressions model to infer site clustering based on multi-year trend and annual cycle amplitude and phase. We examined clustering patterns and relationships among nitrate level, trend, and seasonality parameters. Cluster membership probabilities were governed by continuous, latent variables that were informed with seven classes of covariates encompassing geology, hydrology, and land use. To relate interpretable parameters to the covariates, we modeled amplitude and phase separately in a novel framework employing a bivariate phase regression with the projected normal distribution. The analysis identified regional regimes of nitrate dynamics, including trend classifications. This approach can reveal general patterns that transcend small-scale heterogeneity, complementing site-level assessments to inform regional- to national-level progress in water quality. Supplementary materials accompanying this paper appear on-line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]