Linking Spatial Stochiometry and Resource Selection to Population Ecology

Project: Populations consist of individuals that typically exhibit variation in their response to environmental change. The goal of this research project is to better understand how environmental changes due to forest harvest practices affect individual-based traits that could influence measures of fitness (growth, reproduction, survival). The project will focus on two families of traits: individual-based measures of resource or habitat selection, and variation in stoichiometry (i.e., Carbon:Nitrogen ratio and quantity). This project tests the effects of forest harvest practices on these traits in a trophic hierarchy consisting of herbivores (snowshoe hare) and predators (Canada lynx).

Team: This project is part of a larger research program at MUN that includes food-web ecology and ecological stoichiometry Leroux Lab and landscape ecology Wiersma Lab. The successful applicant will have the opportunity to work closely with all three labs, including collaborating with two other exceptional graduate students on this research program (a PhD student with Leroux and a MSc student with Wiersma).

Training Opportunity: This project will provide excellent opportunities for training and developing marketable skills for employment or further graduate studies. For example, (1) Fundamentals: critical thinking, experimental design, practicing and communicating science; (2) Field skills: trapping and handling hare and lynx; biotelemetry; and snow tracking; (3) Analytical: advanced GIS, capture-mark-recapture population estimates, and programing statistical, spatial, and population models.

Qualifications: Applicants should have four main qualities: (1) a passion for ecological and evolutionary theory; (2) an aptitude for and commitment to research in the field – in all seasons; (3) quantitative skills in GIS, statistical programing in R, and experience or an interest in modeling; (4) and foremost, evidence of collegiality.

Wildlife Evolutionary Ecology Lab: We are a question-driven research group; one of a number of productive and dynamic research groups in ecology, evolution, and animal behavior at MUN.

We bridge fundamental and applied questions in evolutionary, behavioral, population, and wildlife ecology.

To apply please send a letter of interest, CV, and transcripts (unofficial) to eric.vanderwal@mun.ca.