Community and privately-owned urban (green) spaces as Nature-based Solutions

Citizens and community groups in urban areas increasingly seek to actively improve the quality of greenspaces in their immediate surroundings to improve biodiversity and wellbeing. This includes temporary activities such as the interruption of mowing or more permanent actions such as the removal of sealed surfaces, planting of trees or wildflower meadows.

Enhancing, encouraging, and connecting such relatively small-scale activities may significantly contribute to wellbeing and biodiversity at the city scale. This may be especially true for community groups or private organizations that typically own land across a city region (e.g. sport clubs). This PhD studentship will i) create a private greenspace/habitat typology and investigate ongoing private initiatives within Glasgow and ii) map the potential for spatially and temporally integrating public, community, and private green spaces and biodiversity enhancement activities. Finally, the successful candidate will iii) investigate how community and private spaces and activities can contribute as Nature-based Solutions to climate change mitigation and adaptation at the city scale and identify which activities should be incentivised.

The successful candidate will be working primarily within the Work Package 2 of GALLANT: Biodiversity and societal benefits of ‘natural’ urban habitats: Nature-based Solutions in an integrated urban-habitats network alongside two postdoctoral researchers and will closely collaborate with Work Stream 2 ‘Community Collaboration’.

  To be classed as a UK/Home applicant, candidates must meet the following criteria:

• Be a UK National (meeting residency requirements), or

• Have settled status, or

• Have pre-settled status (meeting residency requirements), or

• Have indefinite leave to remain or enter.

All applicants must have or expect to obtain a first-class degree (2.1 or equivalent) in an appropriate discipline. This may cover, but is not limited to a BSc. and/or MSc. in Ecology, Geography or Environmental Science.

The candidate is expected to have fundamental knowledge in ecology, environmental science or physical geography and should be interested in urban biodiversity and socio-ecological urban systems. The ideal candidate will also have strong statistical and spatial data analyses skills, preferably using R.

We champion Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, believing that this is the way to increase research productivity and quality and to enhance societal and economic impact. Likewise, the University of Glasgow and our external partners are fully committed to EDI principles.

We support applications from under-represented backgrounds, childcare support for conference attendance, flexible working for carers and promote a work-life balance.

For enquires related to EDI, please address to GALLANT EDI Champion, Dr Caroline Gauchotte-Lindsay via the GALLANT-phd mailbox.

How to Apply: Please refer to the following

website for details on how to apply: https://www.gla.ac.uk/gallant. For

studentship enquiries, please contact [Email Address Removed].