Cumulative impacts and the resilience of coastal ecosystems

A PhD research project is available working on the potential for thresholds in estuarine and coastal soft-sediment ecosystems. These rapid changes in the structure or function of ecological systems are often called regime shifts. The research will initially consider different approaches to detecting break points in ecological data and developing a mechanistic framework that can go on to be used to support field studies to assess the risk of cumulative impacts in inducing threshold changes in key ecosystem processes and interactions. This project will be under the supervision of Prof Simon Thrush, Institute of Marine Science, The University of Auckland, New Zealand. Work for the project may involve being based either at the University’s city campus or at Leigh Marine Laboratory.