Working with Dr David Edwards and colleagues at the University of Sheffield, UK, as part of the new Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation (LC3M), we are looking to appoint a conservation scientist for an exciting four-year, fully-funded post-doc opportunity. The successful candidate will research the biodiversity and yield impacts of the Centres field experiments on enhanced rock weathering within oil palm plantations in Malaysian Borneo and, more generally, will develop research to understand the conservation implications of enhanced weathering as a geoengineering solution to climate change. You will have field experience working on biodiversity impacts of land-use change in the tropics, plus a record of developing policy-relevant conservation science.
The first aim of this project is to undertake detailed field experiments of the impacts of enhanced weathering on biodiversity in mature oil palm catchments, as well as within neighbouring forests and rivers. Biodiversity assessments will focus particularly on terrestrial and freshwater invertebrates, and may use DNA meta-barcoding analyses. Knowledge of a specific taxonomic group would be advantageous, but not essential. The second aim represents a unique opportunity to develop a new field in conservation science: the implications of enhanced rock weathering as a pan-tropically applied technique for mitigating climate change. The precise directions of this component of the project will be driven by the successful candidate, but could include projecting conservation implications of increased mining for rocks and quantifying roles of global carbon markets in promoting enhanced weathering. This will also involve quantifying the conservation implications of enhanced rock weathering versus other Negative Emissions Technologies. Please contact David Edwards (david.edwa...@sheffield.ac.uk) with any questions. The full advert and application is available at: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AVM652/research-associate- in-tropical-conservation-and-climate-change-mitigation/
