PhD position: Ecological assembly processes: a predictive framework for
fungal metacommunities
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Main supervisor: Nerea Abrego
Application deadline: January 14, 2022
With our planet facing the so-called sixth mass extinction, there is an
urgent need to mechanistically understand the processes organizing
biodiversity. A robust fundamental understanding the forces shaping
biodiversity is the basis for any rational management of natural
resources. Reaching such understanding, is the core aim of community
ecology. Thus, much of the focus of the empirical research in community
ecology is on measuring the roles of different assembly processes in
shaping ecological communities (i.e., measuring what mechanisms
determine what species occur where and when). From earlier research,
one thing is well known: the habitat or abiotic environment has a huge
influence on what species are found at a given location and time. In
other words, the role of environmental filtering as a process shaping
species communities is well known. However, there are other less
studied processes which should also influence species community
composition, as are the role of biotic interactions, dispersal and
stochastic processes. One of the reasons why the latter mentioned
processes remain less studied is simply that they are more challenging
to study, requiring experimental settings and study systems that
conform to the assumptions of theoretical frameworks. In this project,
we will use wood-inhabiting fungal metacommunities in island landscapes
as the study system. One major advantage of wood-inhabiting fungi as
study systems is that they are organized as spatially well-defined
metacommunities, thus conforming to the assumptions of many theoretical
frameworks. Another major advantage they allow for experimental
manipulations targeted to all community assembly processes in a way
that would not be possible for almost any other species-rich community.
The work involved in this project includes fieldwork for collecting
data and setting up experiments, preparation of samples for DNA
analyses, and application of statistical methods, importantly joint
species distribution modelling. Dr. Nerea Abrego will act as the main
supervisor and Prof. Otso Ovaskainen as the co-supervisor. Abrego is an
expert in theoretical and empirical community ecology and Ovaskainen in
mathematical and statistical modelling. The PhD candidate will be
integrated to a multidisciplinary research group focusing broadly on
community ecology, providing the opportunity to gain a variety of
skills (conceptual, theoretical, empirical, bioinformatical and
statistical research) that will enable a wide range of possible career
paths after dissertation.
For further details, please contact: Academy Researcher Fellow Nerea
Abrego (nerea.n.abrego-antia@jyu.fi)
For more details, see the job announcement (this is project #6):
https://www.jyu.fi/science/en/bioenv/research/doctoral-programme/phd-posts/2022/open-doctoral-student-positions
