Within the EU project
RESILIENCE, coordinated by Utrecht University, the Ben-Gurion University, Israel, offers two PhD positions in Pathways of resilience and evasion of tipping in ecosystems.
Your job Ecosystems are highly complex systems characterised by hierarchies of organisation and trophic levels. Their response to climate change is likely to involve mechanisms operating at different levels, such as phenotypic changes and evolutionary adaptation in individual plants, spatial self-organisation of plant and herbivore populations, and community reassembly. Depending on history, disturbances, and environmental variability, ecosystem response can be realised in various pathways; some may lead to tipping points and collapse, while others may result in resilient states.
RESILIENCE aims 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.
You will study various aspects of multi-level ecosystem response to environmental stress in dryland biomes, savanna, or tundra to identify pathways of resilience associated with spatial patterning. You are expected to:
- be involved in the development of spatial vegetation models for plant populations and communities that capture various elements of ecosystem complexity, such as phenotypic changes, plant-resource and plant-soil feedbacks, herbivore dynamics, and effects of ground templates, e.g. stone patterns in tundra;
- study the models using mathematical analysis, numerical simulations, and numerical continuation in one and two spatial dimensions;
- confront model predictions with available empirical data.
You will benefit from the expertise of the four Principal Investigators (PIs) in the RESILIENCE project: Ehud Meron, a physicist at Ben-Gurion University; Arjen Doelman, a mathematician at Leiden University;
Max Rietkerk, an ecologist at Utrecht University; and Isla Meyers-Smith, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia.