Are you a master student in your final year? Are you pondering carreer in academia, biodiversity research, or remote sensing? I offer two fully funded, 4-year, full-time PhD positions in a field spanning macroecology, biodiversity science, ecological statistics, and space-borne remote sensing.

Briefly, the research is part our ERC-funded project BEAST (“Biodiversity dynamics across a continuum of space, time, and their scales”) which studies how biodiversity has changed in time at local, regional, and continental scales, during the last 50 years. The focus is on terrestrial taxa (vertebrates, plants) and facets of biodiversity which can be remotely sensed from satellites.

PhD Position 1: The objective is to analyze temporal change of taxonomic diversity in several datasets from across the world, and to investigate if temporal biodiversity change leaves characteristic imprints in static spatial patterns of biodiversity. The project is macroecological, i.e. it aims at documenting universal ecological patterns and laws that hold across regions and taxonomic groups, similarly to the laws of physics. This can be useful when assessing biodiversity dynamics in regions with poor data.

PhD Position 2: This project will analyze temporal change of remotely sensed spectral diversity, i.e. diversity of spectra captured by spaceborne satellite sensors such as MODIS or SENTINEL. The practical goal is to link this spectral diversity with locally measured taxonomic diversity (and to test the so called “spectral variability hypothesis”), and to investigate if the remotely sensed biodiversity change can be used as a proxy for temporal change of taxonomic diversity.

I want to know more. How can I apply?

Details, requirements, salary, and application instructions are here. Application deadline is 15th of February 2023.