Are you fond of handling and combining large biodiversity and environmental datasets? Do you want to contribute to understand and forecast how ecosystems are impacted by global change? Are you enjoying to work in an interdisciplinary research setting bridging ecology, biodiversity science and Earth Observation with informatics, computer science, and environmental management?
The
Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) at the University of Amsterdam is looking for an ambitious Postdoc in Geospatial Ecology who can contribute to the building of Digital Twins of ecosystems. The position is part of a larger project that develops
LTER-LIFE, a novel large-scale research infrastructure for studying and predicting how changes in climate and other human-induced pressures affect ecosystems and biodiversity.
Your work will be embedded in the Biogeography & Macroecology (
BIOMAC) lab of the
Department Theoretical and Computational Ecology at IBED, and involve collaborations with other consortium partners from Dutch research institutes and universities (e.g. Netherlands Institute of Ecology NIOO-KNAW, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment RIVM, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research NIOZ, and Wageningen University & Research WUR). You will also interact with data scientists, developers and software engineers from other project partners (e.g. Netherlands eScience Center, SURF, DANS-KNAW, NDFF, NLBIF, Datahuis Wadden).
To truly predict how ecosystems and landscapes will respond to current and future global change, we need to combine environmental with biological information and integrate diverse and heterogenous datasets. The LTER-LIFE project will do this by building a user-friendly and secure, cloud-based platform for digital modelling and simulation, and by providing Virtual Research Environments to foster scientific collaboration.
The infrastructure will allow scientists to investigate multiple scenarios by integrating (1) long-term data on plants, animals, and the environment, (2) profound ecological knowledge on species and their interactions, (3) advanced modelling that applies Big Data tools on ecological datasets, and (4) high-performance computing and data science techniques. Scientific use cases will centre around developing Digital Twins of ecosystems for the Wadden Sea and the Veluwe.
What are you going to do? You will support the geospatial environmental characterization of biodiversity data for ecological analysis and modelling in a Digital Twin virtual research environment. In this context, you will analyse and aggregate diverse geospatial datasets from remote sensing or modelled environmental data, such as satellite remote sensing products from Copernicus, climate and land cover maps, habitat types, nitrogen and pesticide deposition, aerial photographs, micro-meteorological and air quality data, human infrastructures, geomorphology, salinity etc.
A key focus will be the development of environmental annotation tools that allow users to specify the spatial and temporal resolution and buffering of environmental characterizations that are relevant for the biodiversity data (e.g. inventories, species occurrences, digital sensor observations). You will be involved in the work package of the LTER-LIFE project that is dedicated to mobilizing and integrating data and making them FAIR for modelling and Digital Twinning virtual research environment (WP4).
You will interact with other work packages, especially those that develop and manage the scientific use cases in the Wadden Sea and the Veluwe (WP2), design and develop the infrastructure services (WP3), develop models and computer codes (WP5), and organise capacity building and training for ecologists and environmental scientists (WP7).
Tasks and responsibilities:
- Handling and processing large geospatial and environmental datasets;
- Prototyping environmental annotation tools for biodiversity data;
- Working with ecologists, stakeholders from national parks and NGOs, database managers, data scientists and software engineers to integrate biodiversity and environmental data;
- Contributing to building a catalogue and inventory of relevant biotic and abiotic datasets and their existing metadata;
- Working with computer scientists, eScience engineers and stakeholders to establish digital connections to various external data platforms and repositories;
- Writing publications in peer-reviewed journals to present the developed tools or analytical results;
- Engaging in training courses for data handling, processing and visualisation.