MSCA-IF: Joint application at the University of Granada. Department of Stratigraphy and Paleontology

Professor Gonzalo Jiménez-Moreno, from the Department of Stratigraphy and Paleontology at the University of Granada, welcomes postdoctoral candidates interested in applying for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (MSCA-IF) in 2019 at this University. Please note that applicants must comply with the Mobility Rule (more information: http://sl.ugr.es/09Qg).

Brief description of the institution:

The University of Granada (UGR), founded in 1531, is one of the largest and most important universities in Spain. It serves more than 60000 students per year, including many foreign students, as UGR is the leader host institution in the Erasmus program. UGR, featuring 3650 professors and more than 2000 auxiliary personnel, offers a total of 75 degrees through its 112 departments and 28 centers.

UGR is also a leading institution in research, located in the top 5/10 of Spanish universities by a variety of ranking criteria, such as national R&D projects, fellowships awarded, publications, or international funding. UGR is one of the few Spanish Universities listed in the Shanghai Top 500 ranking (http://www.arwu.org/), and it is also well recognized for its web presence (http://www.4icu.org/top200/).

Internationally, we bet decidedly by our participation in the calls of H2020, both at partner and coordination. For the duration of the Seventh Framework Programme, the UGR has obtained a total of 66 projects, with total funding of 17.97 million euros, and for H2020, until 2015, more than 25 projects with total funding of more than 6 million euros. Our more than 3,000 researchers are grouped into 365 research groups covering all scientific fields and disciplines.

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group

There are large gaps in our understanding of natural climate variability and how the water cycle and ecosystems will respond to global climate warming. Several scientific reports show that in the near future, the weather in the Mediteranean area, including southern Spain, will be characterized by increased drought frequency. This will generate very important economic and social problems in this region, characterized by scarce water resources. However, climate prediction is still a challenge, due to lack of long databases with quantitative measurements (especially for precipitation and temperature) and studies of how the environment reacted to climate change before the historical record. Long and continuous lake and marine sedimentary records offer enormous potential for interpreting the paleoenvironmental histories of the past and predict ecosystem response to climate change in the short and long term. Our research group is thus interested in studying paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic proxies (e.g., lithology, pollen, charcoal, organic and inorganic geochemistry) from lake and marine sedimentary records from the southern Iberian Peninsula.  

Project description

The high-resolution multiproxy study (vegetation, fire, wind inputs, hydrology, external and internal lake processes) of sedimentary archives of the Archidona and La Ballestera lakes, in the southern Iberian Peninsula will provide very detailed regional information on how these environments evolved in response to climate change in the Late Pleistocene and Holocene. The detail analysis of past periods characterized by warmer and drier climate conditions than today, such as previous interglacial periods, the Holocene climatic optimum, the Dark Ages, or the Medieval Climate Anomaly, will allow us to draw conclusions about how ecosystems will vary when temperatures and / or drought increase in this region. The study lakes are found in areas heavily impacted by human activities (e.g., farming, livestock) and the results produced by this project will also allow evaluating the effects that humans have introduced in these ecosystems and that add to the effects of natural climate change. The data obtained will allow us to advance in the prediction of the effects of climate change and will serve as a tool in the environmental management of these lakes, as well as to obtain indicators that could be extrapolated to other wetlands in the Mediterranean region.

Research Area

Environmental Sciences and Chemistry (ENV-CHE)

For a correct evaluation of your candidature, please send the documents below to Professor Gonzalo Jiménez-Moreno (gonzaloj@ugr.es):

• CV
• Letter of recommendation (optional)