Doctoral Researcher (PhD student) in Butterfly Ecology and Climate Change across Europe
About this role
Doctoral Researcher (PhD student) in Butterfly Ecology and Climate Change across Europe
The Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Helsinki invites applications for a Doctoral Researcher position exploring how butterflies are responding to climate change across Europe. The work will be based at the Viikki Campus in Helsinki, Finland.
The doctoral researcher will join THERMOTRAIT - Tracing the impacts of climate change across biological scales, a Research Council of Finland-funded project led by Dr Emilie Ellis. The project brings together field ecology, natural history collections, long-term biodiversity monitoring, image analysis, climate data and ecological modelling.
The doctoral researcher will work closely with Principal Investigator Ellis and will be co-supervised by Prof Tomas Roslin (University of Helsinki). For this project, the doctoral researcher will also work within an international network of researchers, museum curators, Butterfly Monitoring Scheme coordinators and field ecologists across Finland, Spain and the United Kingdom.
This position is available from 11th January 2027, or as agreed.
About the position
Climate change is reshaping biodiversity, but we still do not fully understand how responses by individual organisms scale up to affect population persistence and community change. This doctoral project will use museum specimens and field collections to investigate whether climate-related shifts in butterfly body size and wing pigmentation over the last century help species cope with ongoing climate warming or instead signal increasing vulnerability across Europe. The successful candidate will develop a rare combination of skills in international fieldwork, museum specimen handling and digitisation, standardised ecological data collection, automated image analysis, large biodiversity datasets, advanced statistical modelling in R, open science and collaborative project management.
The fieldwork spans a remark