PhD position in Plant Ecology at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Halle, Germany

The Department of Species Interaction Ecology offers a PhD position within the DFG project “Climate niches and species immigration in grasslands under global change”. The aims of this DFG project are to investigate i) the role of climate niches for species response to experimental future climate and ii) how demography and functional traits may explain the establishment success of immigrating plant species into grasslands of different land-use intensity exposed to climate change.



The PhD researcher will have the opportunity to work in the large experimental platform Global Change Experimental Facility (GCEF), where future climate is simulated in grasslands managed with different land-use intensity. The candidate will have the opportunity to use already existing data from the grasslands of the GCEF to ask whether the climate niche of species predicts performance in future climate. Further, the candidate will establish a novel seed-addition experiment and quantify if functional traits explain establishment success in experimental treatments. The project is supervised by Dr. Lotte Korell in close cooperation with PD Dr. Christiane Roscher and Prof. Isabell Hensen.