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Australian Postgraduate Award - Industry (APAI) Scholarship opportunity provided by Queensland University of Technology

 This PhD project will aim to develop and apply new statistical tools to improve biomass and carbon accounting. It is part of the Biomass Business research project in the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRC SI).

Biomass Business encapsulates three, interwoven themes (objectives):
a. formulating enterprise-relevant, spatially-enabled measures of water and fertilizer use efficiency in crop and animal production, including plant canopy-based indicators of fertility status and biomass, and develop the tools necessary to acquire these measurements;
b.  creating large and small scale tools for managing livestock  on grazing lands, including rangelands, based on spatially-enabled measures of pasture growth, availability and grazing dynamics; and
c. exploring and establishing techniques for data acquisition and fusion to describe vegetative carbon and biomass across entire production enterprises (farmscapes), including the development of high-definition carbon and biomass inventory tools for farms.

The PhD student will contribute to this project by developing Bayesian spatial models and Bayesian networks to (i) estimate above and below ground carbon variability and trends in farmscapes at different spatial scales, accounting for uncertainty;  (ii) combine different sources of data for evaluating management options; and (iii) quantify the translation of knowledge/models from one location to another. The starting point for this work would be the utilisation of existing datasets, in particular State-wide soil monitoring and experimental site data.

This project will interface closely with an interdisciplinary team of researchers at QUT and the University of New England.
The successful candidate will be a PhD student in the Disipline of Mathematical Sciences, with demonstrated skills in statistical modelling and statistical computation. They will have excellent interdisciplinary and statistical communication skills. It is expected that the student will spend regular time periods at UNE in Armidale NSW as part of the project.
A PhD scholarship in the form of a tax-free living stipend of $25,000 p.a. is offered for a period of three years. Please note that international students will need to pay university fees, although there is some opportunities for fee waivers for exceptional students.


Supervisor: Kerrie Mengersen ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>)


For more information please see
http://www.scitech.qut.edu.au/research/projects_hdr/mathsci.jsp#mengersen2

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