Research Scientist, postdoc, biodiversity mapping (RestMod)
About this role
We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher with an interest in biodiversity research to join the international EU-funded project "Guiding Restoration by Improving Ecosystem Models."
Job description
We are looking for a postdoctoral Research Scientist to join the RestMod Horizon Europe project. LUKE coordinates the RestMod project, which includes 12 partners across Europe and runs for 54 months.
The main responsibility of the postdoctoral Research Scientist is biodiversity mapping using multiple data streams, including environmental data, remote sensing data, and eDNA, across three terrestrial ecosystems: forests, wetlands, and grasslands. The tasks include building a modelling workflow that integrates biodiversity, habitat, environmental, and auxiliary datasets to analyse species community associations using hierarchical modelling of species communities, HMSC.
The postdoctoral Research Scientist will collaborate with Professor Otso Ovaskainen at the University of Jyväskylä and Professor Henrik Smith at Lund University. The role also includes harmonising and compiling datasets from Open Labs in Finland, Belgium, and Portugal, as well as from ongoing and past European research projects such as ForestPaths, SUPERB, ALFAWetlands, and WET HORIZONS.
In addition, the researcher will gather species and trait datasets from platforms such as EuropaBON, GBIF, EBCC, eBMS, and Biodiversity Meets Data. The work will also assess how climate change may alter species distributions and the availability of suitable habitats for key restoration indicator species and EUNIS habitat types at the pan-European scale.
The Research Scientist responsibilities also include spatial prioritisation of terrestrial ecosystem restoration through biodiversity and ecosystem services mapping. The position includes collaboration with colleagues at LUKE to develop a Google Earth Engine based application for monitoring restoration impacts.
International collaboration is essential, as the Ecosyst