Details
The ACCE DTP is committed to recruiting extraordinary future scientists regardless of age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, faith or religious belief, pregnancy or maternity, parental or caring responsibilities or career pathway to date. We understand that a student’s potential can be shown in many ways and we strive to recruit students from all backgrounds, and support them on their scientific journey.
We have designed our application systems to identify candidates who are likely to be successful in research regardless of what opportunities may have been available to them prior to their application.
Various support and guidance on applying for an ACCE DTP studentship, including how to apply; what we’re looking for (including our assessment rubric); details of financial support, training, and placement opportunities available; and details of our recruitment process, can be found at accedtp.ac.uk, in the ‘prospective applicants’ tab.
Project Overview
Global environmental change is altering the structure and stability of marine ecosystems with major implications for the sustainability of commercial fisheries. International efforts to assess the status of marine ecosystems have been hampered by insufficient observations of food web interactions across many species, their various life stages, and geographic ranges. The aim of this project is to use newly available information on fish stomach contents and changing fish species distributions, together with cutting-edge analytical techniques, to provide a global assessment of how marine ecosystem structure and functioning is changing in response to fishing and climate change.
Objectives: The project will combine empirical data with cutting-edge statistical methods to:
- Predict food web interactions for marine fish globally on the basis of taxonomy, traits, and spatial distributions
- Use these predictions to develop a data-driven, reproducible approach to classifying broad functional feeding guilds (e.g. planktivores, benthivores, and piscivores) that are applicable across ecosystems
- Incorporate these new insights into existing food web models to predict changes in network structure as marine fish communities change in response to fishing and climate
Novelty and Timeliness: Understanding fish feeding traits is critical to help better quantify and predict the effect of human pressures, such as fishing and climate change, on global patterns in marine ecosystem structure and functioning. This project is enabled by newly compiled data on fish stomach contents, the development of statistical methods to impute missing diet data, and the ongoing development of allometric food web models allowing results to be generalized at the global scale. It has the potential to feed directly into important initiatives such as the new OSPAR Pilot Feeding Guilds Indicator, co-develped by the Cefas supervisor.
Essential and Desirable Criteria
- Understanding of the core concepts of marine ecology and theories about foraging behaviour, fisheries biology, or food web modelling
- Experience of data manipulation, visualisation, and statistical analysis
- Experience of working with food web models
- Experience of working with data using R or a similar script-based computing environment
How to Apply
Notes and details of how to apply are available here: https://accedtp.ac.uk/phd-opportunities/
All applicants to ACCE must complete the ACCE personal statement proforma. This is instead of a personal/supporting statement or cover letter. The proforma is designed to standardise this part of the application to minimise the difference between those who are given support and those who are not. Candidates should also submit a cv and the contact details of 2 referees.
Informal enquiries may be made to [email protected]
Part-Time Study Options
All ACCE PhDs are available as part time or full time, with part time being a minimum of 50% of full time. Please discuss potential part time arrangements with the primary supervisor before applying to the programme.
This project is a CASE project. Your project will be co-supervised by the non-academic partner organisation, and you will spend 3-6 months on a placement with your CASE partner in their workplace. You will experience training, facilities and expertise not available in an academic setting, and will build business and research collaborations. Your CASE partner will also contribute an additional £1000 per year to your Research and Training Support Grant.
Funding Information
NERC ACCE DTP programme starts from October 2024.
UKRI provide the following funding for 3.5 years:
• Stipend (2023/24 UKRI rate £18,622)
• Tuition Fees at UK fee rate (2023/24 rate £4,712)
• Research support and training grant (RTSG)
Note - UKRI funding only covers UK (Home) fees. The DTP partners have various schemes which allow international students to join the DTP but only be required to pay home fees. Home fees are already covered in the UKRI funding, meaning that successful international candidates do not need to find any additional funding for fees.