PhD in land use and ecosystem services modeling

The Chair for Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems (PLUS) at the Institute for Spatial and Landscape Planning, ETH Zurich, is a young, dynamic and interdisciplinary research team addressing problems of sustainable spatial and landscape development. Starting in October 2020 or under agreement we are looking for a PhD in land use and ecosystem services modeling.

The 4-year PhD position will work in the frame of the VALPAR.CH project. The project aims to assess the added value of a functioning ecological infrastructure (EI) for Switzerland and is part of the Action Plan of the Swiss Biodiversity Strategy. The project team is interdisciplinary and multilingual and consists of scientists from five Swiss universities from the fields of ecology, economics, social sciences, geography, spatial and landscape development and political science.

The PhD student will develop a land use model to forecast future changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services under various socio-economic and climate scenarios. The candidate will use a Bayesian Network approach to integrate various qualitative and quantitative data sources, consider uncertainties in the assessment and run the model in forecasting and in backcasting modes to understand which policy measures are necessary to achieve a functioning ecological infrastructure in the future.