PhD position in marine ecology

There is a vacancy for a PhD position in marine ecology at the Department of Biological Sciences and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research . The PhD position is a part of the Climate Narratives project and a multidisciplinary collaboration with geophysical and social sciences. The position is for a fixed-term period of 3 years with the possibility of a 4th year with compulsory other work; teaching duties and transdisciplinary work with project partners.

About the project/work tasks

The PhD position is a part of the ClimateNarratives project that will use Disko Bay as a case study for a Greenland ocean-glacier system. ClimateNarratives will improve scientific understanding of climate change and changing natural systems in Greenland and the southwest Pacific, and work to better exchange local knowledge and narratives with local indigenous communities. The overall project objective is to co-create new knowledge to better assess physical and biological changes and their societal consequences. There are two other ClimateNarratives PhDs that will work in parallel at the Geophysical Institute (UiB) and at the University of the South Pacific.

The PhD project in marine ecology will focus on the seasonality of the pelagic ecosystem and ecological interactions in Disko Bay, Greenland. The main objective for the PhD project is to provide a better understanding of how the changing physical conditions of the Disko Bay ice-ocean system impact key biological processes in the pelagic. We will use zooplankton as our main study group but also include studies of primary production and fish. At the zooplankton level, species composition, seasonality in abundance, and the timing of key life cycle events will be studied. One of the main aims is to disentangle the roles of land-based processes, such as glacier melt, and ocean-based processes such as sea ice cover and water mass advection, on the ecological dynamics in the bay. The seasonality of these drivers and the biological interactions of the pelagic ecosystem will be given much attention.

The objective will be achieved primarily through analyses of existing data and field work to collect additional samples (zooplankton sampling primarily), lab experiments, and ecological modelling. The field work will be integrated with an ongoing monitoring program. The PhD candidate will collaborate with a Climate-Narrative PhD candidate in physical oceanography, and we aim for active use of the synergies this offer, including joint supervision.

Main PhD supervisor will be Professor Øystein Varpe, with Professor Lars H. Smedsrud at Department of Geophysics (GFI) and Professor Torkel Gissel Nielsen (DTU Denmark) as co-supervisors. It is expected that the candidate will spend time in Ilulissat (Greenland) and do field work on sea ice and from the local research vessel. The PhD student will have access to a team of multi-disciplinary researchers in the ClimateNarratives project and in-depth collaborations across the disciplines will be encouraged and facilitated.