Dear colleagues,
We are looking for a highly motivated PhD-student to join our new research project on the interactions between climate, insect life-history (voltinism) and food webs on oak.
For more information see the project description (below) and the following link:
http://www.su.se/english/about/working-at-SU/jobs?rmpage=job&rmjob=4100&rmlang=UK
and don’t hesitate to contact me directly by email, (closing date is November 5)
My best,
Ayco Tack
Project description
Climate change has already altered the phenology of plants and organisms at higher trophic levels. Among plants, this has resulted in a temporal shift towards earlier bud burst and/or flowering, and among plant-feeding insects in earlier emergences. But more radical changes can happen than shifts in phenology: with increasing temperature, species may increase the number of generations per year (voltinism). Such changes may be extremely important from an ecological and evolutionary perspective, as an additional generation may accelerate both population growth and rate of adaptation, and may also lead to temporal mismatches between interacting species. However, we lack insight in how climate affects the voltinism of species within natural multitrophic communities, and how this in turn may shape food web structure and dynamics.
The overarching aim of the PhD project is to understand how spatial and temporal variation in climate affects the voltinism of a diverse community of herbivores and parasitoids on oak, and the consequences for food web structure and dynamics. The project will combine several approaches: i) fields surveys describing the spatial and temporal patterns in voltinism of a community of herbivores and parasitoids on oak, ii) heating experiments to disentangle how climatic variation (spring, summer and autumn heating) drives the voltinism of, and synchrony between, herbivores and parasitoids, and iii) detailed climate-chamber and laboratory experiments on five selected species to probe the impact of voltinism on herbivore and parasitoid preference and performance.
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Ayco Tack
Assistant professor
Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences
Stockholm University
SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
Visiting address: Svante Arrhenius Väg 20A, room N420
Phone: + 46-(0)8-163959
Mobile: + 46-(0)70-4942557
ayco.tack@su.se
www.plantmicrobeinsect.com
www.su.se/profiles/atack
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