Postdoctoral Position: Spatial patterning and ecological resilience across the tundra biome

Application deadline: February 15, 2025

Location: Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Project Overview

There is an urgent need to understand the effects that global change can have on the Earth, its system components and ecosystems. One area of critical concern is the imminent abrupt and irreversible critical transitions of ecosystems through tipping points. Recent discoveries suggest that spatial pattern formation within ecosystems can enhance resilience, potentially averting or reversing these tipping points.

As part of the ERC-Synergy project Pathways of Resilience and Evasion of Tipping in Ecosystems (RESILIENCE), we are offering a postdoctoral position for a self-motivated candidate that will focus on studying spatial patterns within tundra ecosystems and their role in conferring resilience across the biome. By integrating satellite imagery, aerial photographs, drone data, and in-situ measurements from key research sites across the circumpolar Arctic, the candidate will quantify the extent and variability of spatial patterning in tundra ecosystems, including regions at the treeline. This research will be occurring in ice-rich permafrost ecosystems, investigating how spatial patterns interact with permafrost dynamics and respond to global change pressures. Understanding the impacts of permafrost thaw beyond ecological tipping points is critical for predicting landscape change and resilience.

This research will test the hypothesis that certain spatial patterning can confer resilience to ecological change, using approaches previously applied in savanna and dryland ecosystems. By examining these patterns, we aim to enhance our understanding of tundra ecosystem resilience and predict rates of landscape and ecological change in response to global shifts across the tundra biome. Collaboration with other PhD students, postdocs, and senior researchers from the involved universities will allow us to integrate mathematical and physical models of the data to address the larger project goals.

This postdoc position will be based in the research group of Prof. Isla Myers-Smith at the University of British Columbia, Canada. The postdoc will interact with the full RESILIENCE project team that combines expertise in ecology, mathematics, and physics including: Max Rietkerk (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), Arjen Doelman (Leiden University, The Netherlands), Ehud Meron (Ben-Gurion University, Israel) and many other postdocs, students and project collaborators.

This is a dynamic time to join the project as we launch into our project-wide collaborations, which integrate field research in the Canadian Arctic, advanced remote sensing, and global data synthesis.

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