Postdoctoral fellowship

Topic: Effects of climate and socio-economic changes on ecosystem services provided by the Mediterranean region using an integrated terrestrial-marine model

Deadline for application: September 30, 2018.

Employer: Aix-Marseille University (France), LabEx OT-Med

Location: Marseille (MIO) and Aix-en-Provence (IMBE)

Duration: 18 months, starting on November 1st 2018.

General context

This post-doc fellow will be engaged in the Laser-Med project (Towards an integrated prediction of Land & Sea Responses to global change in the Mediterranean Basin), a multi-disciplinary project involving economists, agronomists, geographers and oceanographers, funded by the “laboratoire d'excellence” Labex OT-Med, which includes ten research laboratories and one research federation specialized in different fields: environmental sciences, law, economics and social sciences.

The main objective of Laser-Med is to study the impact of climate and land use changes on key ecosystem services provided by the terrestrial and marine ecosystems. This goal will be achieved by the integration of state-of-the-art models for agroecosystems (LPJmL) and marine ecosystems (NEMO-MED12/Eco3M-MED) models forced by a common regionalized RCP 8.5 climate scenario.

Specific mission of the post-doc fellow

This post-doc will join the LaSeR-Med project in its concluding phase. The work will therefore benefit from the development and validation efforts already done on the terrestrial and marine models. The expected task are:
(i) running the remaining climatic and socio-economic scenarios with the terrestrial and marine models and the Lagrangian-Individual Based model for the jellyfish Pelagia noctiluca,
(ii) analyzing the outcomes of these calculations for relevant indicators (to be defined),
(iii) contributing to the synthesis of the project outputs through the writing of several high impact scientific publications

Desired skills and experience

Candidates must hold a Ph.D. degree, or equivalent, in geophysical, environmental, or geographical sciences (terrestrial or marine). He/She should have an experience in running complex numerical models, processing large datasets, and be comfortable with geospatial analyses and mapping. Strong analytical and summarizing skills, fluency in English and good capacity to write articles in high impact journals are required.

Knowledge of the Mediterranean area will be an advantage. The candidate should be familiar with the Linux/unix environment, with the C and FORTRAN 90 languages, and with R or Python

Full position description and application procedure