Biodiversity sustains human life. Tens of thousands of species are known to provide material and non-material benefits to people globally, including food, medicine, and energy (1, 2). This intricate relationship between people and biodiversity constitutes an essential weave to the “fabric of life” – a concept proposed recently by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to refer to the whole of the living world (3).
Given the dramatically increasing impact of human activities on nature and associated decline of life on Earth (4), the people-biodiversity weave may be fraying, posing the urgent need for a better understanding of its structure, function, and durability. This PhD project will analyse hundreds of thousands of reports of animal and plant uses collected across the world throughout history to reconstruct the people-biodiversity weave as an interaction network between species and the benefits they provide to humans (e.g., food, medicine, fuel) (5).
The student will estimate species’ vulnerability to global change (e.g., land use and climate change, overexploitation) using the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List and species distribution modelling (e.g., 2, 6, 7, 8).
This will then allow the assessment of the robustness of the people-biodiversity interaction network and humanity’s potential resilience to the biodiversity crisis (e.g., 5, 9). Critically, the network approach will allow the prediction of cascading impacts of species extinctions through the people-biodiversity weave.
This project will enable the identification of priority species and regions for the preservation and restoration of biodiversity and its contributions to people across the world (10, 11, 12).
The student is expected to become an active member of Samuel Pironon’s research group in the Biology Department at Queen Mary University of London (Mile End Campus). The department has an active research community in ecology and global conservation challenges. Weekly meetings will be offered with the primary supervisor and monthly meetings with the secondary supervisors to benefit from the team’s expertise in macroecology, interaction networks, spatial analyses, ethnobiology, global change and conservation biology. The student will be able to join an ongoing ecology journal club, and to participate in multiple ongoing weekly seminar series. The student will also be given the opportunity to meet with supervisors and collaborators at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Oxford University, benefitting from access to world-class botanical collections, data, and expertise. Opportunities for participation to training, workshops and conferences (national and international) will be offered. The student will also be supported through events and activities offered by the QMUL Doctoral College.
Find out more about the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences on our website.
We are looking for candidates to have or expecting to receive a first or upper-second class honours degree and a Master’s degree in an area relevant to the project such as conservation biology, macroecology, computational ecology, global change biology, biodiversity, nature’s contributions to people.
Knowledge of R programming, statistics, data collection, analysis and visualization, interaction networks, species distribution modelling, spatial analyses would be highly advantageous but are not required.
You must meet the IELTS requirements for your course and upload evidence before CSC’s application deadline, ideally by 1st March 2025. You are therefore strongly advised to sit an approved English Language test as soon as possible, where your IELTS test must still be valid when you enrol for the programme.
Please find further details on our English Language requirements page.
Formal applications must be submitted through our online form by 29th January 2025 for consideration. Please identify yourself as a ‘CSC Scholar’ in the funding section of the application.
Applicants are required to submit the following documents:
Find out more about our application process on our SBBS website.
Informal enquiries about the project can be sent to Samuel Pironon AT s.pironon@qmul.ac.uk Admissions-related queries can be sent to sbbs-pgadmissions@qmul.ac.uk
Shortlisted applicants will be invited for a formal interview by the supervisor. If you are successful in your QMUL application, then you will be issued an QMUL Offer Letter, conditional on securing a CSC scholarship along with academic conditions still required to meet our entry requirements.
Once applicants have obtained their QMUL Offer Letter, they should then apply to CSC for the scholarship with the support of the supervisor.
For further information, please go to the QMUL China Scholarship Council webpage.
Apply Online