Fully funded NERC PhD Studentship: Relationships among biodiversity, carbon storage, and productivity across the world’s tropical forests

Tropical forests are species-rich, carbon-dense and highly productive ecosystems. They play globally important roles in (i) biodiversity conservation and (ii) modifying the rate of human-induced climate change. Current efforts to mitigate climate change have renewed focus on tropical forests. Specifically, there is much discussion of ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation’ (REDD) schemes under which developing countries will receive payments if deforestation rates and hence carbon fluxes to the atmosphere were reduced. It is widely thought that reducing deforestation is one of the most cost-effective methods of reducing carbon emissions (Stern 2006), thus any new international agreement to limit carbon emissions is likely to formally include tropical forests and a REDD scheme. However, it is currently unknown how such investments to mitigate climate change - requiring preserving forests with the largest standing stocks of carbon and reducing deforestation and degradation in those forests with currently high loss rates - may affect other priorities, such as biodiversity conservation.

Using data from 350 long-term monitoring plots, this project will tackle three of the most important outstanding scientific questions, namely (1) the issue of whether or not the most carbon-dense and/or productive forests are also in fact the most diverse (species diversity and phylogenetic diversity), (2) whether high biodiversity per se is a factor that actually boosts carbon storage and productivity, since diversity may help to maximise ecosystem-level resource-use efficiencies, or alternatively whether any relationship between the two is simply coincidental, and (3) whether the size of the current net carbon sink in a given tropical forests is partially determined by its diversity.

Full details http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/research/eco/projects.html or contact Oliver PhillipsO.Phillips@leeds.ac.ukApplication deadline: 2nd March 2009