2-Year Post-doc at the University of York in Natural Resource Management
Deadline: 28 June 2022
Location: York, UK
Salary: £33,309 per year
Full-time.
The post-holder will join the UKRI Future of UK Treescapes project “Connected treescapes: a portfolio approach for delivering multiple benefits from UK treescapes in the rural-urban continuum”. This large interdisciplinary team is led by Prof Piran White and Dr Julia Touza at the University of York, UK. The post-holder will be based in the Environment and Geography Department at the University of York. You will be supervised by Julia Touza (Environment and Geography) and Jacco Thijssen (Department of Mathematics). This position is for 2 years. Treescapes have a key role to play in helping the UK government’s targets for carbon reduction and nature recovery, and in enhancing health and wellbeing and providing a source for cultural inspiration.
The ‘Connected treescapes’ project focuses on assessing the impacts of interventions and policies, so that the multiple benefits from treescapes can be maximised, while enhancing their resilience to socio-economic and environmental risks. The underlying methodology is based on a portfolio approach. Managing a portfolio is about deciding how investments should be diversified across multiple assets so that future benefits can be assured, with minimal risk. The post holder will contribute to development of bioeconomic models using cooperative game theory to understand how the heterogeneous portfolio objectives, interventions and risks of different landowners in a landscape interact. The work will evaluate the effectiveness of policies, in the form of incentives, in achieving the levels of cooperation between landowners that are needed to achieve socially-desired outcomes.
Role
To develop and conduct independent and collaborative research on the management of UK treescapes, focusing on the modelling of treescapes landowners’ behaviour under risk, applying a game theory to study how policy interventions affect the strategic interactions in the delivery of the expected benefits from treescapes.
Key responsibilities include:
- To plan, coordinate, develop and undertake world-leading individual and collaborative research in the area of treescape policy and management, write up research findings and contribute to the production of research outputs.
- To collaborate with, and advise, other researchers from the natural, social sciences and the humanities, to increase the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research in the UK Connected Treescapes project and develop proposals for future research.
- To develop understanding of the effectiveness of policies interventions in delivering multiple societal benefits from UK treescapes.
Skills, Experience & Qualification needed
- PhD in an appropriate subject area.
- Strong quantitative skills (statistics, econometrics, modelling)
- Experience in the development of bioeconomic modelling and/or game theory approaches
- Ability to develop research objectives, projects and proposals for own and joint research, with the support assistance of a mentor if required
- Highly developed communication skills to engage effectively with a wide-ranging audience, both orally and in writing, using a range of media
- Ability to write up research for publication in high profile journals and competency in presenting work at conferences/other appropriate events.
- Capacity for inter-disciplinary work and willingness to work proactively with colleagues in other work areas.
For further information:
https://jobs.york.ac.uk/vacancy/research-associate-in-natural-resource-management-487461.html