PhD Candidate: Wetland Restoration and Management Trade-offs Between Biodiversity and Carbon...

Are you interested in wetlands and their biodiversity and climate saving carbon stores? And do you wish to unravel key strategies for wetland and peatland restoration? As a PhD candidate you will boost crucial wetland knowledge and develop sound tools for fast-tracking large scale restoration action using a holistic approach.

Your PhD research will aim at identifying wetland-specific options for restoration that minimise trade-offs among carbon storage, biomass production, biodiversity, and water- or nutrient-related regulation ecosystem services. You will be working in the European Wet Horizons Research Consortium. Your primary goal is to quantify trade-offs between biodiversity, climate regulation and ecosystem services (biomass, water, nutrients) and potential abatements of trade-offs (e.g. water management, paludiculture). You will blend information on best restoration practices regarding management dilemmas and mitigation of trade-offs, using data collated from restoration projects, as well as new empirical data. You will conduct fieldwork at the project's restoration sites collecting empirical data on biodiversity, carbon storage, GHG emissions, nutrient release and water quality. Working with interdisciplinary teams you will validate BioScore's model with your own empirical data collected from field sites in the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Denmark (and beyond). Your work will directly contribute to indicators (no-regret scores), which will be tailor-made to the needs of management agencies and stakeholders, helping them to identify options for large-scale restoration of wetlands, peatlands and floodplains that minimise trade-offs (using the SERVI-PEAT Decision Support Tool provided by the project partners). To amplify the impact of your PhD research, you will be given the opportunity to explore novel ideas and to break new ground in the field of wetland restoration and peatland rewetting.