项目介绍

2026年10月1日

Are you interested in spatial ecology, species distributions, and plant functional traits? Do you want to contribute to understanding global patterns of plant diversity, and plant responses to environmental change?

Conserving biodiversity in a rapidly changing world requires understanding why some species occupy vast geographic ranges while others remain restricted to small areas. Traditionally, efforts to answer this question have focused on understanding and predicting the distributions of individual species. However, recent advances in biodiversity and trait datasets have expanded our capacity to incorporate the functional characteristics of species, allowing us to go beyond the species concept and better capture the variation in biota using functional traits across different levels of biological organisation.

This PhD position explores how functional traits influence global patterns of plant biodiversity and plant responses to environmental change. The project focuses on three different levels of organisation, ranging from broad functional forms that capture major ecological plant strategies (e.g. tree, epiphyte, shrub), to finer levels of organisation among species (inter-specific variation) and within species (intra-specific variation). As a PhD candidate, you will make use of large trait databases like TRY and BIEN, and be responsible for setting up a greenhouse experiment similar to that of a provenance trial set-up (i.e. growing seeds collected from across a species’ native geographic range under varying environmental conditions). Specifically, your duties and responsibilities include:

• Collating plant distributions, functional traits, and environmental data from various sources
• Setting-up and conducting a greenhouse experiment to assess variation in plant phenotypic plasticity under simulated environmental conditions
• Publishing your research in peer-reviewed journals and presenting your research at (inter)national conferences
• Mentoring BSc/MSc students

You will work here
The research is embedded within the Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation group, which is led by Prof. David Kleijn. You will be supervised by Dr. Coline Boonman and Dr. Amanda Taylor. Prof. David Kleijn is the promotor.