Banner with isotope graphic.

Professor Clement P. Bataille, Department of Forestry & Natural Resources

SAiVE Lab

Spatio-temporal Analytics of Isotope Variations in the Environment

Welcome to SAiVE Lab!

Isotopes are the building blocks of life and are billions of years old but secretly they trace your everyday life history.

At the SAiVE Lab, we decode this isotope treasure hunt and use isotope chemistry to monitor and manage natural resources.

about

Insect migration and conservation research, integrated modeling pathways.

The SAiVE Lab — Spatio-temporal Analytics of isotope Variations in the Environment — is an interdisciplinary research group founded by Clement P. Bataille in 2017 at the University of Ottawa and since 2025 is based in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, where Dr. Bataille holds the Belcher Chair of Environmental Sustainability. We bring together geochemistry, ecology, genomics, data science, and Earth observation to understand and manage how animals and materials move and change across space and time.

SAiVE Lab identity.

Our planet is facing accelerating environmental change that threatens biodiversity, natural resources, and sustainable development. Isotopes are ubiquitous markers of origin and process, and over the past decades the scientific community has generated millions of isotopic measurements from soils, water, plants, animals, and rocks worldwide. The SAiVE Lab works to unlock the potential of this data — through open, reproducible, FAIR-principled science — to build predictive tools that trace the movement and origin of life. Our vision is to harness isotope science as a tracer of life’s movements to pioneer and deploy solutions for sustainable natural resources management.

Graph showing deploying isotope soluctions for environmental sustainability. Circle with arrows to blocks has title of Isotope and data sciende. Aquatic ecosystems block has fisheries management, marine conservation, watershed sustainability. Forestry block has Forest Pest Management, forest carbon, and wood forensics. Terrestrial wildlife block has animal conservation, insect migration and meagfauna and paleoecology.

Our research spans an unusually broad range of systems, all unified by isotope geolocation and isotope data science. We forecast the migrations of invasive and native insects that threaten crops and forests to anticipate and manage their consequences, we reconstruct the journeys of ancient megafauna to understand the drivers of their extinction, we trace the origin of timber and food for supporting a sustainable bioeconomy, we follow aquatic animals between rivers, lakes and oceans to predict their population dynamics for fisheries and conservation, and we investigate the evolution of Arctic river weathering processes in a warming climate. All of those research directions are connected by the same core toolkit — multi-isotope measurement, spatial statistics, and predictive modeling.

A Note from Clement

Clement Bataille with forest background.

Growing up in a small village of southern France, near the wine region of Bordeaux, I was drawn from an early age to the idea of terroir — the notion that a place, with its unique geology, soils, and climate, leaves a distinctive imprint on what grows there. That childhood intuition taught me to see the natural world as a system of interconnected spheres. It was only when I discovered isotope science, together with advances in geospatial and data science, that I understood how deeply and broadly those interconnections could be investigated. The SAiVE Lab is built on that idea: that the chemistry of a place is written into the living things that pass through it.