PhD Fellowship In Marine Science

Centre for Ocean Life (www.OceanLifeCentre.dk) offers a 3-year PhD fellowship under the project "MARine MAnagement and Ecosystem Dynamics under climate change ". The fellow will be employed at DTU Aqua (The National Institute for Aquatic Resources, Technical University of Denmark).

The successful candidate will work within the project “MARine MAnagement and Ecosystem Dynamics under climate change (MARmaED)” an Innovative Training Network funded by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (The European Union's Horizon 2020) under grant agreement No 675997 for the period 2015-2019. MARmaED is an international and interdisciplinary network that unifies specific and complementary competences in marine sciences from Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany and France to investigate how the cumulative stress from biodiversity loss, climate change and harvesting will affect Europe’s complex marine systems and the consequences for optimal resource management (www.marmaed.eu). The project’s main aim is to investigate how combined anthropogenic and climatic changes affect different harvested ecosystems (terrestrial, freshwater, and marine – particularly, but not only, in Arctic regions) and how management strategies can be improved to ensure sustainable exploitation and resilience. MARmaED will provide salary for 15 PhD projects.

The specific PhD project of this position will “develop a trait-based approach for predicting fish community structure, function and services under different scenarios of climate change and exploitation”. The project will build on characterizing fish community composition based on a number of key functional traits and relate spatio-temporal changes in these traits to internal (biotic) and abiotic processes and drivers. This multivariate trait-based model will be based on observed data on community composition, in one or several data rich case studies, e.g., the North Sea. Once fitted and cross-validated the model framework will be used to explore future changes in community composition and its associated effects on ecosystem functioning (e.g., productivity) and services (e.g., fisheries yield) under different scenarios of exploitation and climate change, informed by climate model projections. To that end, the approach will not only provide novel insight into the processes shaping functional community composition but act as a practical decision-support tool for evaluating the success or failure of various management strategies under climate change.

Eligibility: Students must be interested in marine ecology with an emphasis on trait-based ecology, and biodiversity with relevant background in statistics. Candidates should have a Master’s degree or equivalent in a relevant discipline.