项目介绍

2026年10月3日

Are you a highly motivated and enthusiastic ecologist who wants to uncover how nitrogen deposition affects plant and arthropod biodiversity? Are you excited by the idea of combining large-scale fieldwork across Northwestern Europe with hands-on experiments to answer a question that matters for biodiversity conservation? If so, this PhD-position could be the perfect fit for you!

Human-driven nitrogen (N) deposition is changing ecosystems worldwide. It can cause an oversupply of nitrogen in the soil and soil acidification, and shift the balance of nutrients; not just how many nutrients are available, but also the ratios between them (their ‘stoichiometry’). This changes which plants thrive, and it changes the nutritional quality of the leaves and pollen that herbivorous and pollinating insects consume. However, we still poorly understand how these changes unfold within and among plant species, or how they cascade to affect insect performance and, ultimately, insect community diversity. As a PhD candidate, you will contribute to finding this out. You will combine field studies in Northwestern European forests across a N-deposition gradient spanning the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden with greenhouse and controlled feeding experiments on caterpillars and solitary bees.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• Design and conduct field studies across Northwestern Europe to assess how large- and small-scale gradients in N deposition affect soil chemistry, plant stoichiometry, and plant and arthropod diversity
• Perform experiments to find out how nutrient concentrations in plant leaves and pollen affect the performance and food preferences of insect herbivore and pollinator species
• Analyse complex ecological datasets, linking soil, plant and insect variables
• Co-supervise MSc students conducting thesis research within the project
• Publish your results in a PhD thesis, as well as in peer-reviewed papers

You will work here
The research is embedded within the Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation (PEN) group at Wageningen University, which is led by Prof. David Kleijn. Daily supervision will be by Dr. Philippine Vergeer, Dr. Jeroen Scheper, Dr. Fons van der Plas (all PEN) and Dr. Wim Ozinga (Vegetation and Landscape Ecology, Wageningen Environmental Research).