Integration of the thesis project into the local, regional and international scientific community:

It is becoming a major challenge to come up with sustainable solutions that are built and accepted by all stakeholders, in order to steer mining activity towards greater responsibility, as the impacts will add up to those of climate change, all of which will have severe consequences for populations, their living conditions and their health: It is becoming urgent to combine these inclusive issues for a development that simultaneously reduces negative environmental footprints (Hund et al 2020), an objective declined in the specific framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and extractive mining activity in general (Mapping Mining SDGs).

The preservation and restoration of mining ecosystems and their biodiversity is thus a major societal challenge to preserve the chances of improving the well-being and health of populations (UNUNEP, 2018; 2020 Summit - United Nations on Biodiversity) and in line with the "green transition" priority of the high-level political dialogue between the African Union and the European Union (https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/strategy/strategy-2020 2024 /europeworld /international-cooperation/eu-africa-cooperation/green-transition-priority).

In this sense in particular, the degradation of the functioning of "mining" ecosystems and their biodiversity is a major area to address in West Africa, where the Living Biodiversity index decreased by 65% between 1970 and 2016, linked to 40% to changes in land and ocean use (WWF living planet report, 2020), changes estimated at a minimum of 6% from mining activity in protected areas (Rachel et al. 2019).

In Morocco, the environmental aspects linked to mining activities are among the important projects to which the country is giving increasing importance. The 2015 Mining Code (law 33/13 of July 1, 2015) is the legislative expression of this, including several measures relating to the environment.

Université Mohammed-V, the country's oldest and one of its most important universities, is actively involved in this major project, and has made the "environment" one of its strategic research priorities. The challenges of preserving and promoting biodiversity in general, and plants adapted to the mining context and hyperaccumulators of metals in particular, are global, both in terms of restoring degraded environments (phytostabilization, depollution), bio-recycling metals (phytomining) and preparing future sustainable development sectors.

Prospects after completion of thesis:

I'd like to do a postdoc to stay in the research field.