Phd candidates welcome: Fire and landscape modelling in the Mediterranean

We welcome PhD candidates interested in starting a thesis on the impacts of climate and land use changes on fire regimes and landscape changes in Spain in the context of the project “BIONOVEL: Assessing the impact on biodiversity of uncertain and novel future landscapes under different drivers of global change in a Mediterranean region “ within the Biodiversity and landscape Ecology lab (http://biodiversitylandscapeecologylab.blogspot.com/) and the MONTES project lead by CREAF (http://www.creaf.uab.es/montes/).

The present project has as a main objective to develop an ecological and modelling framework that accounts for uncertainty in the study of the responses of Mediterranean ecosystem to a wide range of environmental pressures. In a context of global change, the present challenge is to develop approaches that allow the prediction of species responses to further change and develop new paradigms of planning and management guidelines compatible with the novel ecosystems concept. However, the prediction of species responses such as shifts in species distribution patterns is not an easy task as many interacting factors constraint current species distributions and are likely to do so in the future. The integration of these elements in modelling platforms and methodological approaches to reproduce the responses of landscapes and species distributions to variability in the perturbation regime is a step forward (http://sites.google.com/site/medfireproject/). The BIONOVEL project will allow the integration of ecological relevant processes that allow the generation of scenarios of future biodiversity changes, at local and regional scales, in areas with environmental pressures dominated by climate change, land use change (i.e. abandonment or urbanization) and fire disturbances.

Requirements:

• Degree in biology, forestry, geography or similar.
• Excellent academic (above 2.0 in 1to 4 Spanish academic evaluation system)
• Academic qualifications that allow starting a doctoral degree
• Experience in GIS and remote sensing. Programming skills preferred.
• Contrasted capacity to lead work and team up with other researchers.
• Knowledge of Catalan language appreciated.

Working conditions

• Candidates need to have a competitive profile for a Spanish doctoral fellowship as we would support the applicant for the next FPU fellowship. It is convenient to check requirements in previous announcents (Formación Profesorado Universitario Fellowship Program)
• Working place in Solsona (120 km north of Barcelona, Spain), Forest Technology Center of Catalonia (CTFC).

Interested candidates should send their CV, a motivation letter (one page maximum) and the contacts of two reference researchers, via e-mail before January 31^st 2012 to: lluis.brotons@ctfc.cat