We are thrilled to announce that La Caixa Foundation awarded a PhD studentship in Araujo lab to work on climate change and conservation planning. The studentship is highly competitive and  applicants will compete for this position together with applicants for other projects. 

 A description of the project offered can be found below and here:

Global climate and land use changes pose a challenge for conventional conservation planning for biodiversity. Because climate change will shift the distributions of suitable areas for many species, it is expected that some species will become locally extinct in existing protected areas. As a result conservation resources may be squandered where they are no longer needed. Furthermore, conservation of some vulnerable species may require new areas that are currently both climatically unsuitable and unprotected and it may be that ongoing and future land use dynamics will add further constraints to the biodiversity conservation planning process. The dynamic nature of species’ geographic ranges, as they respond to climate and land use changes, has been effectively ignored by previous conservation-planning approaches but clearly needs to be accounted for in conservation planning methodologies. The PhD student will develop conceptual and methodological approaches to deal with the range dynamics problem in conservation planning. Empirical applications will be developed at a variety of spatial scales from national to global levels.

• How should important biodiversity conservation areas be selected under climate and land use change?

• How can the dynamics ranges problem be expressed by operational mathematic formulations and how can these formulations be implemented with big data?

More general information about this call can be found here.