Director of research at INRAE, Isabelle Cousin is currently deputy director of the Info&Sols research unit in Orléans. A soil physicist, her research focuses on water and gas exchanges between soil, air and crops. For the past ten years, her work has also focused on the regulatory services provided by agricultural soils, in particular climate regulation and the capacity of soils to store and release water to plants or aquifers. Her research thus aims to provide operational proposals for the quantitative management of water resources in agriculture, notably through irrigation control, and more generally, for the sustainable management of agro-ecosystems. She is currently coordinating a European project and a national study to develop and map soil quality and health indicators on a national and European scale.