PhD-position: Mapping Ecological Regime Shifts

The Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University announces in collaboration with Stockholm Resilience Centre an externally funded PhD-position in Natural Resource Management (Refer-ence number Dnr 11/2010), starting in August/September 2010).

Project title
Mapping ecological regime shifts

Project description
Ecosystems can shift from being organized around one set of ecological processes and patterns to another. Research has identified an increasing number of such ecological re-gime shifts in systems as diverse as boreal forests, coral reef, shallow lakes, and rangel-ands. These ecological regime shifts are being documented by the regime shifts database project (www.regimeshifts.org) at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

This project will work with the regime shift database project to build models of particular regime shifts that allow us to estimate the probability of regime shifts across landscapes. The research aims to directly address a key research gap identified by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and contribute to future ecologi-cal assessments.

Estimating the occurance of regime shifts in landscapes requires operationalizing regime shifts concepts — moving them from the precise world of mathematical world to the com-plicated and messy real world. We are looking for a PhD student who is excited to devel-op innovative methods as part of an transdisciplinary research team at the Stockholm Re-silience Centre. This team includes several researchers, PhD students, and Masters stu-dents, as well as our international collaborators.

Applications will be assessed based on the following criteria:
- theoretical knowledge of relevance to the research project
- practical experience and knowledge of relevance for the project
- knowledge of scientific theory and method
- analytical ability as demonstrated by a scientific report, paper or degree project thesis
- the applicants personal references
- equal opportunities

Experience within the fields of ecological resilience, regime shifts, and social-ecological systemsis of merit as is experience of working with quantitative methods such as GIS, statistics, and modelling.

Nature of the employment
A Ph.D position lasts four years and is a full time position. After acceptance of the PhD project plan prepared by the student, the student will be awarded a stipend of 15 500 SEK / month (“utbildningsbidrag").

After maximum 2 years, the student is expected to defend his/her licentiate thesis (PhD up-grading). After successful defence of the licentiate, the student will be employed within a PhD position (“doktorandanställning"). Up to 20% teaching or other work may be included in the position (and the position extended accor-dingly to 5 years). Salaries are set according to the relevant salary scale