Below are details of a UK research council funded PhD project which 
would be suitable for an ecologically-minded statistics student or a 
highly numerate ecologist.

NB The closing date of 01 December 2008


Title:  Dynamics of fragmented populations: identifying ecological 
processes from incomplete data using state-space statistical models and 
long term data on water vole metapopulations

Supervisors:
Prof Xavier Lambin (University of Aberdeen), Prof David Elston (BioSS), 
Dr Len Thomas (CREEM, University of St Andrews)

Description
Environmental change results in previously un-fragmented populations 
becoming increasingly fragmented, smaller and thus more exposed to 
stochastic processes. Understanding the dynamics of metapopulations 
consisting of extinction-prone local populations is a challenge to 
ecology and, increasingly, to conservation ecology because of the 
non-linear processes operating within local populations as well as the 
complex nature of the dispersal processes linking the local populations.

This interdisciplinary project, suited to quantitative ecologists and 
biostatisticians, will exploit as well as contribute to the continuation 
of a very large scale field study of water vole (Arvicola terrestris) 
metapopulations in the Highlands of Scotland that already spans 10 
years. The project will begin by fitting advanced but relatively 
standard metapopulation models to these data in a Bayesian setting, 
building the skills of the student and adding to knowledge about these 
metapopulations. These models will be augmented to assess whether 
including hitherto ignored but strongly empirically-supported aspects 
(e.g. density dependent emigration and immigration, seasonally 
restricted natal dispersal) of the dispersal behaviour of individuals 
translates into metapopulation-level dynamics effects. In this way, the 
project will develop novel, statistically rigorous approaches of general 
relevance for testing complex biological hypotheses about the way 
metapopulations function using diverse sources of survey data.

Further details and how to apply, see
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/clsm/graduateschool/researchdetails.php?ID=492
or contact any of the supervisors to discuss the project in more depth.



-- 
Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS) is formally part of The
Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI), a registered Scottish charity
No. SC006662