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The position (for 6 months) is based in Montpellier (France).
Since the early 1980s, Cirad and its partners set up experimental forest plots for monitoring post-harvest tropical forest dynamics in order to assess the effects of selective logging on the reconstitution of timber stocks. Since 2016, these experimental sites are part of an international network, the Tropical Managed Forest Observatory (TmFO), coordinated by Cirad.
Within this network, forets dynamics data accumulated over more than thirty years can be used to simulate post-harvest trajectories in tropical forests as a function of logging intensity, and key environmental variables (climate, soil, etc.).. For example , the recovery of the biomass, timber stock and changes in biodiversity were assessed assessed on the scale of the Amazon basin. The results showed under the present 35-year logging cycle in force in Brazilian Amazonia, the recovery of timber stock is less than 50%.
This work in the Amazon region deserves to be extended to other tropical rain forest regions for which the TmFO network has data, in order to assess the conditions for the sustainability of timber production on a pan-tropical scale. The TmFO network provides all the conditions required to carry out this work in terms of data availability (4 sites in Central Africa and 7 sites in South East Asia, representing a total inventory of more than 400 ha). In order to carry out this study, it will first be necessary to adapt the model used in Amazonia to the context of other datasets in other continents (under a 6-month contract from May 2022). The initial 6-month contract may be extended by the same duration, depending on the preliminary results of this first 6-month period and the funding obtained in 2023.
You will be required to:
- Analyse forest dynamics monitoring databases from several experimental sites in the TmFO network
- Adapt a Bayesian modelling framework developed for assessing timber stocks in Amazonia to the pan-tropical scale.
- Develop a framework of methodological procedures to integrate data from selected TmFO sites into the model developed to simulate the harvesting cycles
- Initiate the first simulations and present them to the TmFO network
To learn more about the profile sought and the terms and conditions of the position, consult the complete offer here
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