[TABD] PhD opportunity

[Blanca Huertas]

Para informacion de los interesados,

Saludos cordiales, 

Blanca Huertas


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           PhD, Postddoc & Scientific Programmer positions
                             at the
                    Universiteit van Amsterdam
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The Universiteit van Amsterdam is, in close cooperation with other
stakeholders in the Netherlands, building a scientific research facility
as well as an operational system to analyse the spatio-temporal
distribution of flora and fauna (we briefly call this infrastructure
EcoGRID). While the scientific research facility will be used mainly for
ecological research, the operational system will facilitate land-use
planning and legislative tasks for a broad group of public and private
stakeholders.

The preparation for this project started already two years ago, with the
creation of a virtual spatial database (called NDFF) that integrates all
the data of the collaborating Dutch non-governmental organizations
(VOFF). To date, NDFF contains 20.000.000 records, and is continuously
growing with new observations that are collected by more than 15.000
observers via dozens of different monitoring projects and incidental
observations (all still limited to the Netherlands).

Currently we are in the process of connecting and converting databases
from other data-owners in the Netherlands to the EcoGRID data model, so
that analyses across all kinds of different species groups (and
monitoring plans, etc.) will become possible. In addition, environmental
data (terrain, soil, hydrologic, meteorologic station as well as gridded
data, etc.) is being linked to or stored in the system.

During the coming four years, we want to focus on the creation and
application of generic web-based tools that facilitate multivariate
spatio-temporal analyses of species distribution and abundance in
relation to environmental characteristics. The tools will typically be
created in R or Java and embedded in a workflow system to maximize
accessibility and robustness and to stimulate component reuse (probably
we will use Kepler). Currently two researchers and a scientific
programmer are developing EcoGRID, but we are looking for three
additional
colleagues: a PhD student who will focus on measurement uncertainty and
the propagation of this uncertainty in ecological observations, a
Postdoc who will develop and apply general analysis procedures on
species and multiple-species data (e.g. trend analysis, spatio-temporal
interpolation algorithms, visualisation techniques for multivariate
data), and a scientific programmer who will further develop the EcoGRID
web-portal and implement techniques developed by the research team in
the EcoGIRD system as web-services.

We think the following characterises some essential features of our
research
group: while we are proud of our current achievements and will be
working very hard to gain important new and fundamental (ecological
/statistical
/computational) insights, we also consider the comradely and inspiring
atmosphere at our multi-disciplinary group as a very important asset
(www.science.uva.nl/ibed-cbpg).

Below, the URL's to the job-descriptions are given. If you are
interested, please read the information at those web-pages and send us
your curriculum vitae and a letter of motivation. Further information
can be obtained from Prof. Willem Bouten, tel. +31 20 525 7412, email
W.Bouten en uva.nl.


PhD student (4 years)
keywords: observation error, uncertainty ecological observations, error
propagation ecological analysis
http://www.science.uva.nl/vacatures/object.cfm/objectid=D7AF02E1-0F33-4B
26-AA4BF8EBD59A214A


PostDoc (2 years)
keywords: develop and apply trend analysis, space-time interpolation,
visualisation of multivariate biodiversity data
http://www.science.uva.nl/vacatures/object.cfm/objectid=BC87AB1C-0531-49
7E-BDA282194A3D5285


Scientific programmer (2 years)
keywords: expand EcoGRID webportal, implement analysis-techniques as
web-services on webportal
http://www.uva.nl/vacatures/object.cfm/objectid=7D2C764A-31CF-431D-92D1F
4238D0345B4