Category: Career Step

PhD Opportunity: Above and below ground carbon stocks and biotic changes during rewilding

  • Deadline: 01/02/2023 5:00PM
  • Studentship code: RDS
  • Staff name: Dr Ambroise Baker
  • Contact: a.baker@tees.ac.uk
  • Start date: Successful applicants will be expected to start May or October 2023.

This project will quantify changes in biodiversity, ecosystem function, carbon stocks and their interactions during the initial phases of rewilding. At the primary field site, some 66 experimental fixed plots are set up within formerly agricultural land comprising a variety of arable, improved, and natural grasslands. Rewilding was initiated in 2022, with the cessation of agricultural activities which will be followed by large herbivore re-introduction (eg hardy free-ranging cattle and pigs). The analysis will quantify ecosystem changes in time, against baseline data collected in 2021-2022, and enable an assessment of rewilding contribution notably to net-zero and nature recovery policies.

We anticipate the project to be a unique opportunity to work with a range of collaborators inside and outside academia. We are looking for candidates with a strong interest in combining biodiversity, microbiological and environmental science, to develop novel evidence contributing to the UN decade of ecosystem restoration.

  • Important Note: This fees-only PhD Studentship covers tuition fees for the period of a full-time PhD Registration of up to four years, subject to satisfactory progress. This is not a fully-funded opportunity, unfortunately.

Applicants who are employed and their employer is interested in funding this PhD, can apply for a Collaborative Studentship.

Applications are welcome from UK, EU and International students.

Editorial Advisor for Plant People Planet, New Phytologist Foundation

This external committent at Plant People Planet will be an opportunity to bring together academic and botanical expertise and develop my editorial skills.

Plants, People, Planet aims to promote outstanding plant-based research in its broadest sense and to celebrate everything new, innovative and exciting in plant sciences that is relevant to society and people’s daily lives. For more details, see our Aims and Scope.

I am very fortunate to have joined the editorial board at large and will be serving as editorial advisor.

“Monitoring Change during Rewilding” at the INTECOL 2022 conference

I’m delight to announced that Dr Ed Rollason (VC Fellow at Northumbria University) and I are organising the talk session:

“Monitoring abiotic, biotic and socio-ecological change during rewilding: opportunities and barriers”

part of INTECOL2022 in Geneva, Switzerland, August 28 – September 2 2022.

The International Association for Ecology (INTECOL) supports collaboration amongst ecologists and ecological societies across the world. The INTECOL congresses are organised every four year and are some of the most important international ecology conferences.

The proposal now accepted justified the session of talks as follows:

“Rewilding, as a conservation practice, is increasingly put forward as a nature-based solution providing multiple benefits contributing to tackling the current climate and biodiversity crises. Yet, the full scale of these benefits remains to be quantified over time and in a variety of situations.

“In this session, we present a series of talks that provides the audience with an overview of relevant monitoring practices and aims, as well as selected case studies. Speakers will demonstrate how the field of ecology, multidisciplinary by nature, can facilitate data collection, evidence gathering and decision-making during rewilding.

“Effective monitoring during rewilding can collect critical evidence for multiple purposes. Firstly, it enables the measurement of progress and success for specific time frames and situations such as abandoned agricultural landscapes. Secondly, it can facilitate adaptative management when specific benefits such as carbon sequestration are targeted. Thirdly, it provides guidance for planning, undertaking or initiating new rewilding initiatives.

“This session will not only disseminate important knowledge about one key conservation practice lined up to fight climate change and biodiversity loss, but also, it will bring together a collective of ecologists with unique expertise and a shared interest for monitoring change during rewilding.

“In addition to expertise, diversity was an important consideration when bringing together this collective of speakers: from within and outside academia; and straddling all career stages (from PhD student to full Professor).”

Pollen production review (in prep.) presented at the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting 2018

I was so excited when I received an email from the British Ecological Society (BES) saying that the abstract submitted with Sandra Nogue (University of Southampton) had been accepted for an oral presentation at the 2018 BES Annual Meeting!

And here I am presenting our review paper in preparation – thank you Sandra for taking this picture and many thanks also to the PollerGEN project for providing the illustration for the slide captured here.

Abstract: Modification of pollen production in response to global change: a review

How pollen abundance and quality impacts human–environment system is a significant focal point in: i) public health, with pollen-born allergies and asthma, ii) ecosystem services with crop pollination and nutrient cycling in nutrient-poor wetlands iii) global change ecology and conservation with reproductive limitation and vegetation regeneration. Atmospheric dispersal and pollinators are key dispersal mechanism currently investigated to quantify and forecast pollen impacts. However, pollen production by plants from natural, semi-natural and urban vegetation can be extremely sensitive to environmental conditions, while being at the same time the ultimate driver of these pollen impacts. Despite this crucial role, it is currently un-clear how pollen production will be modified by global change in the future. As a result, longer-term forecast of pollen impact may be associated with extremely large uncertainty.

As a first step towards addressing this key knowledge gap, we reviewed the environmental factors governing pollen production, in terms of pollen quantity and quality. We focussed on factors directly modifying pollen production, given existing vegetation cover and composition; and therefore excluded factors such as habitat loss. Studies tended to focus on the response of a single, or a small set of species, to a single factor. There appears to be a dearth of research studying pollen response at the vegetation plot or ecosystem level. The principal factors driving pollen production in the species studied were nutrient enrichment, increased atmospheric CO2 levels, changes in UV levels, and climatic factors modifying water availability, seasonality and temperatures. Other factors, including biological interaction such as grazing were extremely under-researched. The studied factors often had effects in opposite directions but the outcome of interaction between factors was rarely quantified. In addition, we found a body of literature that concerned flowering response. However, there was only limited quantitative data linking flowering response to pollen production.

Lecturer in Biology, Teesside University, UK

From August 2018, I will be a Lecturer in Biology at Teesside University, School of Engineering, Science and Design, Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, UK. I will be contributing to Biological and Environmental Science teaching as well as developing research.

My teaching and research are focussed on understanding how biodiversity and ecosystems respond to environmental change. This understanding is critically important to developing evidence-based policies to conserve biodiversity, protect the environment and maintain ecosystem services in the current context of global change.

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Assistant Editor short-term contract at the Journal of Experimental Botany

In June and July 2018 I will be working as Assistant Editor for the Journal of Experimental Botany based at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre. The Journal of Experimental Botany is a top journal in plant science owned by the Society of Experimental Biology and published by Oxford University Press. I will be guiding newly submitted papers on their journey though the peer-review process.

 

Second post-doc on freshwater biodiversity

From January 1st 2016, I will start working as a post-doctoral researcher on the newly funded project Hydroscape, one of NERC’s highlight topics.

Hydroscape is led by Dr Nigel Willby at the University of Stirling and is interested in the importance of interactions between connectivity and stressors for freshwater biodiversity.

From   https://hydroscapeblog.wordpress.com/about/   :

“Hydroscape is a four-year project that started in December 2015 and is funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). It aims to determine how stressors and connectivity interact to influence biodiversity and ecosystem function in freshwaters across Britain. While stressors such as nutrient pollution and climate change drive ecological degradation, connectivity between freshwater habitats is a major force behind both dispersal of stressors and biodiversity. Currently, the implication for freshwaters of future changes in stressor intensity and in connectivity levels across Britain are poorly understood. Hydroscape will significantly improve this understanding and therefore inform the work of organisations engaged in waterbody restoration, biological conservation, the control of invasive species and diseases of wildlife and humans, at the international, national and local level.”

My main focus within Hydroscape will be on the “Distribution of biodiveristy within the landscape” and how connectivity affects biodiversity distibution, connectivity being a measure of potential for dispersal.

PhD Thesis abstract, final version after revisions, February 2014

Tree cover in the early Holocene in temperate Europe and implications for the practice of re-wilding in nature conservation

This thesis addresses the methodological challenges of determining the variability of large herbivore populations through time and their impact on European vegetation.

Large herbivores are at the heart of conservation policy however, opinions widely diverge on whether we should aim for fewer herbivores and managed populations or, on the contrary (as advocated by the rewilding movement) more herbivores and self-regulating populations acting as ecosystem engineers. This controversy has roots in a debate regarding the nature of ecosystems before the prevalence of human activities. Baseline ecosystems are either described as continuous forest cover with passive large herbivores, or, in contrast, as mosaics with patchy forest cover driven inter alia by bison, aurochs and horses, now rare or extinct in Europe. The main obstacle in moving this debate forward is a poor understanding of large-herbivore densities in the past.

I analysed modern pollen and spore assemblages from known environmental settings to improve palaeoecological interpretation of fossil assemblages dating from the pre-human (baseline) period. The sites investigated are the rewilded grasslands of the Oostvaardersplassen (The Netherlands), the mosaic habitats of The New Forest (UK) and the old-growth closed-canopy forest of Białowieża (Poland).

I demonstrate that the common practice of interpreting pollen percentages fails to estimate past forest cover in situations with natural grazing. As an explanation, I suggest that pollen productivity fluctuates with biotic factors such as herbivory and canopy shading. As a result, new insights into the baseline debate require additional lines of evidence. In this thesis, I develop an existing methodology to reconstruct past herbivore presence using fossil dung fungal spores. I synthesise current knowledge of this method with an emphasis on spore identification and, finally, I demonstrate that dung fungal spore abundance in lake sediments can be translated into large herbivore numbers.

The evidence presented in this thesis contributes to the debate on re-wilding and addresses a fundamental challenge of nature conservation in the human-dominated landscapes of Europe.