Institut für Meteorologie und Klimaforschung Atmosphärische Umweltforschung (IMKIFU)
Do you have knowledge of land ecosystems, climate change and land use change? Do you have good quantitative and coding skills? Are you keen to apply these to address societal and ecological research challenges? If so, we can offer you to earn your PhD degree within a multidisciplinary, international research training group, with partners at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, the University of Melbourne, Australia and the University of Hohenheim, Germany.C4LaNd is a new research training group that brings together senior and doctoral researchers from the natural, social, economic and engineering sciences to address the challenges of sustainably using land for the benefit of both people and nature. You will receive a dual PhD degree from KIT and University of Melbourne, Australia, including a one-year research stay in Melbourne, Australia. Further information on C4LaNd, and the PhD positions advertised can be found at C4LaNd.earth. The PhD position 'Modelling Sustainable European Forests in a Future Climate' is within the Global Land-Ecosystem Modelling Group (https://lemq.imkifu.kit.edu/) at KIT's 'Campus Alpin' in GarmischPartenkirchen, Germany, partnered with the Quantitative and Applied Ecology Group at Melbourne, Australia (https://qaeco.com/landing/).The overarching question of the doctoral research will be: how can European forests be made 'climate smart' with synergies for multiple ecosystem services under different climate-change and socio-economic futures?Lines of research include:Familiarize yourself with the ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS Further develop the parameterization of European forest species in LPJ-GUESS Review literature and other data sources to support this parameterizationExplore options of bringing plant functional trait-based approaches into the parameterization of European trees in the model Conduct simulations and evaluate output against observations Develop ideas for model applications, simulation set-up and analysis and publications Document code development and performance
Salary
Salary category 13 TV-L, depending on the fulfillment of professional and personal requirements.
Contract duration
3,5 years.
Application up to
17.05.2026
Contact person in line-management
For further information, please contact Prof. Dr. Almut Arneth (almut.arneth@kit.edu).
