St Andrews Studentship in Statistical Ecology: measuring biodiversity

UK National Centre for Statistical Ecology

This PhD studentship will be within the UK National Centre for Statistical Ecology (NCSE), a joint research centre between the Universities of Kent, Cambridge and St Andrews, and will be based at St Andrews in Scotland.

Nearly 200 countries have signed up to the goal of reducing the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010. This raises the question of how regional biodiversity should be measured. Without suitable measures and associated precision estimates, we cannot assess whether the ‘2010 targets’ have been met. However, most biodiversity study sites are unrepresentative and incapable of delivering estimates of regional biodiversity. Further, the impact of variable detectability or trappability among species and across sites on biodiversity measures is typically ignored.

The project is to review existing biodiversity measures, and assess their relevance to the 2010 targets. Shortcomings will be identified, and better methods developed. The focus will be on quantifying the rate of loss of the various components of regional biodiversity, and on tools for assessing whether this rate of loss is being reduced. Survey design will also be reviewed, and recommendations made for future survey schemes.

The successful candidate will join a large and thriving group of research staff and students in the EPSRC-funded NCSE (http://www.ncse.org.uk/), and will be located in the Centre for Research into Ecological and Environmental Modelling (http://www.creem.st-and.ac.uk/). Supervisors will be Stephen Buckland (http://www.creem.st-and.ac.uk/stb/stb.html) and Anne Magurran (http://bio.st-and.ac.uk/staffProfile.aspx?sunID=aem1).

The studentship covers home fees and the standard research council stipend for 3 years. It is open to any applicant, but applicants from outside the European Union will need to seek additional funding to cover the difference between home and overseas fees. Applicants should have a first degree in statistics, or in a related discipline with a strong quantitative component. Start date is negotiable, but should be between October 2007 and October 2008.

If you are interested in applying, please e-mail Steve Buckland (steve@mcs.st-and.ac.uk), attaching a CV.