Postdoc: quantitative plant ecology Applications are invited for a full-time postdoctoral position for 18 months in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield, UK. It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), with a start date of 1 Sept 2009, or as soon as possible thereafter. The grant is held by Colin Osborne, with Rob Freckleton and Victoria Uren (Department of Computer Sciences) as co-investigators, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and the software development company Knowledge-Now as project partners. The project has a strong international component, with further project partners at the University of Lausanne, Brown University, and University of Washington.
The project has been funded to develop GrassPortal, a world-class ecological data facility that will provide users with the analytical and visualization tools to explore the environment and ecology of every one of the 11,000 grass species on Earth. The development of this facility will integrate millions of species occurrence data from digitised herbarium collections with an accurate multi- dimensional spatial representation of the global environment. The applicant will be expected to have strong quantitative skills and will be responsible for acquiring, processing and modelling the large datasets necessary to develop GrassPortal. There is significant scope within the project for developing research applications for this new resource in evolutionary biology, climate change science, and conservation biology. The position will be advertised formally at www.jobs.ac.uk and http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/jobs/research.html in the coming weeks. In the meantime, informal enquiries are welcomed, and should be addressed to Colin Osborne at [email protected]
