PhD Position: Biodiversity for Nature-Inclusive Dairy Farming

In this PhD position, you will develop integrated and innovative biodiversity monitoring and data analysis techniques to aid in the decision-making of businesses within the dairy sector for the benefit of biodiversity.

Biodiversity recovery is essential to sustain resilient food systems, robust businesses and healthy societies. A transition to a more nature-inclusive dairy sector in the Netherlands would be pivotal to biodiversity recovery, because of its influence in shaping landscapes through land use and management, and because of its socio-economic relevance.

To properly assess the suitability and effectiveness of key performance indicators and the effects of management practices on local biodiversity, it is crucial to monitor, for example, breeding birds, bats, insect communities and soil life (depending on the KPI).

By adapting and developing biomonitoring techniques programmes at dairy farms that are in line with long-running or recently developed monitoring schemes, you will utilise the full potential of datasets and methods to quantify biodiversity gains resulting from nature-inclusive farming as well as the potential for further biodiversity recovery. Novel instruments such as DIOPSIS smart insect cameras, LED buckets and bat loggers generate huge amounts of biodiversity data from across the Netherlands and can be used to detect and identify biodiversity automatically.

National schemes like the breeding bird monitoring project, the butterfly monitoring scheme and the dragon fly monitoring scheme (standardised and coordinated by NGOs such as Sovon and Dutch Butterfly Conservation, and powered by thousands of citizen scientists) generate standardised long-term trends based on thousands of plots around the country. You will design novel, integrated analyses to quantify the effects on biodiversity from existing and new data while accounting for factors such as observers' bias, weather and surrounding landscape configuration.

In this project you will:

1. Bring coherence across the diverse monitoring systems and KPI developed so far and adapt sets of KPI's suited to peat soils.
2. Document the relationships between different nature-inclusive measures taken by heterogeneous farm types, and the different aspects of biodiversity and ecosystem services considered. The precise type of monitoring and the number and locations of monitoring points will be decided in collaboration with stakeholders.
3. Further develop effective and integrated monitoring to guide decision-making in businesses and develop reward schemes.

Your teaching load may be up to 10% of your working time.

Would you like to learn more about what it’s like to pursue a PhD at Radboud University? Visit the page about working as a PhD candidate.