For our ERC-Synergy project Pathways of resilience and evasion of tipping in ecosystems (
RESILIENCE), the University of British Columbia offers a PhD position for a self-motivated candidate with a strong scientific background in the fields of ecology, remote sensing, environmental sciences, data science, mathematics or statistics with excellent English language skills.
Your job There is an urgent need to understand the effects that global change can have on the Earth, its system components and ecosystems. One area of critical concern is the imminent abrupt and irreversible critical transitions of ecosystems through tipping points. Recent discoveries indicate that such tipping could be evaded and even reversed in ecosystems through spatial pattern formation, thereby creating pathways of resilience.
The aim of RESILIENCE is to fundamentally advance our understanding and predictions of tipping points and critical transitions in ecosystems and reveal how these can be evaded and even reversed through spatial pattern formation. RESILIENCE will develop a new theory for emerging resilience through spatial pattern formation and link this with real tipping-prone biomes undergoing accelerating global change: savanna and tundra. The candidate will benefit from the expertise of the four Principal Investigators (PIs) in the RESILIENCE project:
Max Rietkerk, an ecologist at Utrecht University, Arjen Doelman, a mathematician at Leiden University, Ehud Meron, a physicist at Ben-Gurion University, and Isla Myers-Smith, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia.
In this PhD project at University of British Columbia, you will study spatial patterns in tundra ecosystems, revealing how spatial patterns relate to ecosystems tipping points including permafrost thaw in tundra ecosystems. For this project, you could use a combination of satellite images, aerial photographs, drone imagery and
in-situ data from focal tundra research sites and regions around the circumpolar Arctic to quantify how spatial patterns relate to landscape stability and permafrost thaw over time. This research will increase our understanding of tundra ecosystem resilience and will be used to predict rates of permafrost thaw disturbances across tundra landscapes with global change. We collaborate with other PhD candidates, postdocs and senior researchers from the different involved universities to explore mathematical and physical models of the resulting data to address the larger project goals.