Postdoctoral Research Opportunity to Explore & Model Uncertainty Associated with Estimates of Ecosystem Service Production and Value
A postdoctoral research project training opportunity, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), is available at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency National Health and Environmental Effects Laboratory based at the Western Ecology Divisions coastal ecology laboratory in Newport, Oregon. The postdoctoral trainee will be participate in a project to explore and model the propagation of statistical uncertainty through linked models of the ecological production and benefits valuation of ecosystem good and services (EGS). This research supports EPAs Sustainable and Healthy Communities Research Program to develop spatially-explicit decision support tools for communities to evaluate how land use practices and environmental management policies affect the production and value of EGS to their populace. The participant will be involved with a team of ecologists, ecological economists, and modelers who are developing systems to estimate the production and value of multiple ecosystem services for coastal, forested and agricultural watersheds. These models will be used to generate scenarios of future outcomes of different land use practices, environmental management policies, or climate change. The postdoctoral trainee will be involved in coupling uncertainty analysis to those systems models to evaluate the statistical confidence with which modeled outcomes of different scenarios can be distinguished, and to use the results of those analyses to identify ways to reduce uncertainty in modeling the production and valuation of EGS. For a full description of this opportunity and to obtain application materials, visit the website: http://orise.orau.gov/epa/description.aspx? JobId=10586 For more information about the research, contact Ted DeWitt (mentor) ([email protected])
