About this role
Wageningen University & Research Biological sciences » Biodiversity Biological sciences » Botany Environmental science » Ecology Environmental science » Global change First Stage Researcher (R1) Application Deadline 25 Oct 2026 - 22:59 (UTC) Country Netherlands Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Not Applicable Hours Per Week 38.0 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No Offer Description Are you interested in spatial ecology, species distributions, and plant functional traits? Do you want to contribute to understanding global patterns of plant diversity, and plant responses to environmental change? Conserving biodiversity in a rapidly changing world requires understanding why some species occupy vast geographic ranges while others remain restricted to small areas. Traditionally, efforts to answer this question have focused on understanding and predicting the distributions of individual species. However, recent advances in biodiversity and trait datasets have expanded our capacity to incorporate the functional characteristics of species, allowing us to go beyond the species concept and better capture the variation in biota using functional traits across different levels of biological organisation. This PhD position explores how functional traits influence global patterns of plant biodiversity and plant responses to environmental change. The project focuses on three different levels of organisation, ranging from broad functional forms that capture major ecological plant strategies (e.g. tree, epiphyte, shrub), to finer levels of organisation among species (inter-specific variation) and within species (intra-specific variation). As a PhD candidate, you will make use of large trait databases like TRY and BIEN, and be responsible for setting up a greenhouse experiment similar to that ...