Biodiversity loss has severe impacts on ecosystem services and humans. Many EU-level policies and initiatives demand unbiased, integrated and regularly updated biodiversity and ecosystem service data. However, efforts to monitor biodiversity are spatially and temporally fragmented, taxonomically biased, and lack integration. The advertised position will be part of the international consortium Europa Biodiversity Observation Network (EuropaBON), which aims to bridge these gaps by designing an EU-wide framework for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services to support biodiversity policies in Europe.

Are you familiar with biodiversity monitoring program designs, including their cost-effectiveness? Do you have experience with biodiversity policy and legislation in Europe? Are you able engaging and communicating with a large network of stakeholders? Then we may be looking for you.

Designing an EU biodiversity monitoring framework:

To co-design a cost-efficient framework for the future monitoring of biodiversity across Europe, we need to identify the core variables to be measured (i.e. Essential Biodiversity Variables, EBVs), design a sampling scheme that delivers robust trends, and provide insights for a feasible and cost-efficient implementation. EuropaBON builds on a diverse set of stakeholders to identify user and policy needs for biodiversity monitoring, assesses current monitoring efforts to identify gaps and workflow bottlenecks, and analyses the cost-effectiveness of different schemes. This will be used to co-design an improved biodiversity monitoring system across Europe, building on a robust design, and making use of remote sensing, novel technologies and citizen science to become more representative temporally, spatially and taxonomically.

EuropaBON project:

EuropaBON is a H2020 coordination and support action. It started in December 2020 and it will finish in November 2023. It consists of 15 partner organizations across Europe covering universities and research institutes, governmental or public institutions, private companies and NGOs. All partners in EuropaBON have high-level and complementary expertise in the different areas of the project, ranging from networking and cost-effectiveness analysis, biodiversity monitoring, modelling and analysis, to stakeholder engagement, policy support and dissemination. The project is structured into five work packages. WP1 oversees the coordination and management of the project. WP2 is the hub of the project and focuses on stakeholder engagement. WP3 centers on the assessment of existing monitoring capability in Europe whereas WP4 will co-design a cost-efficient framework for the future monitoring of biodiversity across Europe. WP5 will demonstrate in a set of showcases how workflows tailored to the European biodiversity directives and cross-cutting policies can be implemented. The current EuropaBON network includes >370 members from >230 organizations and 45 countries. The outputs of EuropaBON will contribute to design and investigate the feasibility of setting up a center to coordinate monitoring activities across Europe. 

Embedding:

The position is based at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Netherlands. You will be embedded in the Biogeography & Macroecology (BIOMAC) lab of the Department Theoretical and Computational Ecology (TCE) of IBED.

What are you going to do

You will

• Develop designs for the robust sampling of Essential Biodiversity Variables across Europe.
• Interact with project partners and stakeholders to understand current data integration, analyze the cost-effectiveness of monitoring schemes, and describe the potential contribution of novel technologies for the future monitoring of biodiversity across Europe.
• Produce a synthesis report with suggestions for biodiversity data flows in the context of reporting to the European biodiversity policies.
• Participate in international EuropaBON stakeholder workshops and in regular EuropaBON meetings and networking events.

What do we require

• PhD in a relevant field (e.g. ecology, biodiversity science, statistics, physical geography, data science, remote sensing).
• Comprehensive knowledge of biodiversity policy and monitoring in Europe.
• Understanding the current way of reporting to European nature policies, e.g. Habitats Directive, Water Framework Directive, Birds Directive, Marine Strategy Framework Directive.
• Experience with biodiversity sampling designs and/or the calibration of remote sensing data with in-situ measurements.
• Capability of working in interdisciplinary teams and willingness to interact with a diverse set of partners and stakeholders.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills in English (and willingness to learn Dutch) .
• Proven track record in scientific publications.

Fixed-term contract: until November 2023.

A temporary contract for 38 hours a week, until the end of the EuropaBon project in November 2023.

The salary, depending on relevant experience before the beginning of the employment contract, will be €2,836 to €4,474 (scale 10) gross per month, based on a fulltime contract (38 hours a week). This is exclusive 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

Are you curious about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits like our excellent opportunities for study and development? Take a look here.

University of Amsterdam

With over 6,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

Faculty of Science – Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics

The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 7,000, as well as 1,600 members of staff working in education, research or support services. Researchers and students at the Faculty of Science are fascinated by every aspect of how the world works, be it elementary particles, the birth of the universe or the functioning of the brain.

The IBED is one of eight research institutes of the Faculty of Science at the UvA. The research at IBED aims to unravel how ecosystems function in all their complexity, and how they change due to natural processes and human activities. At its core lies an integrated systems approach to study biodiversity, ecosystems and the environment. IBED adopts this systems approach to ecosystems, addressing abiotic (soil and water quality) and biotic factors (ecology and evolution of plants, animals, and microorganisms), and the interplay between those. The IBED vision includes research encompassing experimental and theoretical approaches at a wide variety of temporal and spatial scales, i.e. from molecules and microorganisms to patterns and processes occurring at the global scale. The position is embedded in the Department TCE of IBED which focuses on understanding the complexity of ecological systems by using theoretical and advanced computational approaches.

A key research focus is to address how organisms cope with changing environmental conditions and how nature and life is distributed across our planet. Within TCE, the position is embedded in the Biogeography & Macroecology (BIOMAC) lab, a research group which aims to quantify how biodiversity and abiotic components of the Earth system vary across space and time, how they interact, and how responses of species and ecosystems to changing environmental conditions can be predicted and forecasted.

The group covers a wide variety of scientific backgrounds, including ecology, data science, conservation science, physical geography, Earth science, and global change biology.