Join us - Open positions and thesis topics

Context: Drone-based yperspectral imaging of vegetation has the potential to identify plant water stress across the landscape. It is hypothesised that at this scale, effects by limited moisture availability in the rooting zone are not evenly distributed and potentially relate to topographic gradients and vegetation-groundwater connectivity.

The University of Bern is seeking a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher for a two-year position in Earth System Modeling with a focus on land vegetation dynamics, jointly hosted by the Climate and Environmental Physics division at the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Geography and affiliated with the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research.

Context: Vegetation dynamics and the land carbon cycle can now be modelled more realistically thanks to a new generation of demography-resolving vegetation models. The succession of vegetation types since the Last Glacial Maximum, as reconstructed paleo-climatic archives, provides a perfect test for these models’ hindcasts of vegetation change and thus also their forecasts of vegetation responses to future climate change.

Context: Tree-ring data is available in spades but has only marginally been used in the context of climate impacts on the land carbon cycle. Aim: This project will develop methods to use information of annual tree-ring anomalies for constraining modelled tree growth and forest dynamics in response to climate variability.

Main supervision: Prof. Dr. Benjamin Stocker Co-supervision: Dr. Antoine Cabon, WSL Birmensdorf Forests currently represent a large carbon sink, offsetting a quarter of human CO2 emissions each year, bur large uncertainty remains on the future strength of this sink.

Background Seasonal water deficits, caused by the imbalance of water from the land surface through evapotranspiration and runoff and the gain through precipitation, are an important driver of agricultural productivity and forest growth.

Background Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) are key tools for understanding biosphere-climate feedbacks and transient vegetation dynamics in response to global change. A novel vegetation demography model, the BiomeE, is a mechanistic cohort-based model which simulates vegetation dynamics and biogeochemical processes.

Supervision: Prof. Benjamin Stocker, Co-supervision: Dr. Laura Marqués, Dr. Yann Vitasse (WSL Birmensdorf) Background Climate warming is driving an advance of leaf unfolding in trees, promoting longer growing seasons. However, the advance of the start-of-the-season (SOS) can induce false springs, i.