PhD scholarship within applied quantitative ecology

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NMBU has 1700 employees and 5200 students and is organized in seven faculties. NMBU has a campus in Ås and in Oslo. In the autumn of 2020 we are co-located on Ås.

About the position

Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management (MINA) at Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) has a vacant 3-year PhD position in applied quantitative ecology, focusing on how tropical forest mammals use time as indicated by an unprecedented availability of systematic camera trap data from multiple sites and years across the tropics. The focus will be on analysis of pre-existing data rather than collecting field data.

The PhD candidate will work on an NMBU supported component of the larger project “Empty Forests and Extinction Filters” funded by the Research Council of Norway. The overall project, based on an extensive international collaboration, aims to improve understanding and prediction of species vulnerabilities to extinction through a rigorous evaluation of (pre-existing) data that includes millions of camera trap images and other systematic compilations.

The component undertaken by the successful candidate focuses on animal activity patterns. Goals include characterization of when and under what conditions each population of each species in each site is active (with regard to diel and lunar cycles, weather, etc). These patterns will allow a multi-site cross-regional comparison regarding how species partition time and an evaluation of how activity patterns are impacted by human interventions and other factors.

In a series of connected analyses studies, the PhD student, in collaboration with other members of the research team, will develop these results into four or more draft articles.