Postdoc in Modelling Arctic Bird Areas

Climate change is redistributing biodiversity and reshaping ecological interactions. In the Arctic, climate is warming faster than in any other region on Earth and extreme variations in temperature and precipitation are becoming more common. Breeding ranges of Arctic birds are expected to contract, and species will be confronted with altered climate variability, trophic mismatches, and changing predation and snow conditions. Currently, it is unknown whether these pressures will translate into population declines. There is thus an urgent need to assess climate change vulnerability of these species. Moreover, most of these birds are migratory, and the Netherlands bears an international responsibility because large proportions of their populations stage or winter within its borders. However, it largely remains unclear whether and how mitigation measures at stopover or wintering sites are possible.

The position is based at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics  (IBED) of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. You will be embedded in the Biogeography & Macroecology  (BIOMAC) lab of the Department Theoretical and Computational Ecology  (TCE) of IBED. In addition, you will interact with ornithologists, ecologists, and climate modelers from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology  (NIOO-KNAW), the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research  (NIOZ), and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute  (KNMI).

What are you going to do

The Netherlands Polar Programme (NPP) is a funding scheme from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to support scientific research into and in the polar regions. The NPP wants to contribute to solutions for fundamental scientific and socio-political issues, such as the consequences of climate change. The NWO has provided nearly 1 Mio EUR in the NPP to support research on the ‘Vulnerability of Arctic migratory birds to rapid climate change’ (project duration 3/2021–2/2025). The aim of this project is to integrate existing and novel bird data at individual and population level with state-of-the-art climate model simulations and vegetation modelling to assess the vulnerability of arctic migrants to rapid climate change.

Part of this project will assess the climate change risks for Arctic migratory bird distributions. Here, the main aims are to (1) compile a comprehensive Arctic bird distribution database for stopover areas, breeding, and wintering sites; (2) model the effects of climate and other drivers on bird distributions; and (3) predict future species distributions and areas of risk under different scenarios of climate warming. Underlying data will come from compiled movement tracks of various migratory bird species, complemented with census data and other sources of species distribution data (e.g. GBIF occurrence records). Together with downscaled climate data from the most recent and accurate state-of-the-art global climate models within the framework of Climate Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), the candidate will model the current and future habitat suitability of stopover, breeding and winter ranges of migratory Arctic birds using species distribution models (SDMs).

You will:

• compile a comprehensive Arctic bird distribution database for stopover areas, breeding, and wintering sites;
• model the effects of climate and other drivers on these bird distributions;
• predict future species distributions and areas of risk under different scenarios of climate warming;
• write high quality scientific papers;
• contribute to teaching of the MSc course Global Ecology & Biodiversity (e.g. computer practicum using R and/or GIS);
• help with supervising MSc and BSc students in their research projects in macroecology and global ecology;
• present your work within IBED, at conferences, project meetings, policy events and elsewhere.