Biodiversity is facing increasing anthropogenic pressures, including climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, overharvesting, and invasive species establishment. While it is clear that global biodiversity is declining, responses of local assemblages are less well understood.
In this PhD project, you will be quantifying the effects of various anthropogenic pressures on local-scale biodiversity worldwide. To that end, you will assemble biodiversity monitoring data from literature and existing databases and analyze these data in relation to the effect of particular pressures, such as climate change or habitat fragmentation. You will be performing comparative analyses of biodiversity changes across realms (terrestrial and aquatic), geographic regions and species groups, in order to increase our understanding of the magnitude of change and the mechanisms involved. Statistical techniques to be applied include (Bayesian) multi-level modelling and meta-analytical approaches. The project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). The results of the project will be integrated in PBL’s GLOBIO model, which is routinely used in large-scale biodiversity assessments (www.globio.info).
Requirements:
You are a motivated candidate with an MSc degree in macroecology or a relevant related field. Ideally, you meet the following requirements:
- you have a drive for ecological research with conservation application;
- you have a strong background in statistics and affinity with meta-analytical approaches;
- you have experience with managing and analyzing large datasets;
- you are a proficient programmer, preferably in R or Python;
- you have a good command of spoken and written English.
Application deadline: 29 August 2018
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