There are two new PhD positions at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The first is to work with me, Garry Peterson, and then second to work with Line Gordon.
Position one: Mapping ecological regime shifts
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 students, as well as our international collaborators.
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).
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.
Position two: Adapting to climate change: the re-greening of the Sahel as a potential success case
We seek to recruit 1-2 PhD candidate(s) for participation in a trans-disciplinary research project analyzing social-ecological systems in Niger and/or Burkina Faso in the Sahel.
The project addresses the current trend of increasing biomass production (here referred to as the re-greening) in the Sahel, and aims to improve the understanding of how to adapt to, and cope with, climate variability and change in marginal environments.
The student(s) will be involved in comparative analyses of different villages and/or landscape segments in the Sahel that have responded to climate variability in contrasting ways (e.g. situated at different places along a degraded re-greened continuum) to improve the understanding of why a positive change has taken place in some areas, while not in others.
The work will include 1) analysis of the historical development that have led to the current re-greened/degraded state in respective area; 2) analysis of quantity and quality of ecosystem services currently generated in the landscape, including the influence of this on poverty dynamics; and 3) analysis of potential development trajectories in the future, through e.g. scenario planning.
It’s interesting to see research on ecological regime shifts and society-ecology dynamics. Such kind of researches can aid greatly to a real-world transition towards sustainability.