Two New Postdoctoral Positions ! – (1) Macroecology of land plant biodiversity: Niche evolution and ecological limits; (2) Tropical Ecology: Experimental Trait-based ecology of tropical forest ecosystems
The Enquist lab has positions for two new postdoctoral positions to start fall 2016 (1) Postdoctoral Position – Macroecology of land plant biodiversity: Niche evolution and ecological limits. The College of Science at the University of Arizona is seeking to fill a position in Plant Macroecology and trait-based niche evolution. This position, funded by the National Science Foundation, will work closely with an interdisciplinary group of researchers associated with the University of Arizona (Enquist Lab), Kenyon College (Andrew Kerkhoff), and Wesleyan University (Dana Royer) together with international collaborators from the Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN). We are looking for a candidate to investigate the fundamental ecological and evolutionary processes that generate continental-scale variation in plant biodiversity. The post-doc’s main responsibility will be to lead integration of plant diversity, macroecology, plant trait, and climate measures associated with the biogeography of plant diversity. The successful candidate will lead a novel research program that leverages the BIEN database, the largest botanical dataset in existence, with information on the distribution, ecology, and evolutionary history of more than 100,000 plant species in North and South America. The candidate will take advantage of computational advances in biodiversity informatics, phylogenetic analysis, and multivariate niche modeling to investigate how the evolutionary contingencies of adaptation, diversification, and dispersal interact with possible ecological limits on the ‘niche space’ of different environments. The main goals of this position are to test whether the colonization of novel environments is limited by niche evolution, and whether less physiologically favorable environments actually impose hard ecological limits on the number of plant species they can support. The unprecedented scale of […]
