Insects provide crucial ecosystem services, by pollinating commercial crops and wild flowers, by controlling pests, by recycling biological material, by creating healthy soils, and by being food for many larger animals. Without insects, ecosystems simply cease to function. Insects have had to deal with increasingly fragmented landscapes that have been devastated by the agricultural expansions of the 20th century. Such landscape fragmentation –combined with the impacts of climate change– affects many insect species simultaneously. Worryingly, several observations indicate that the abundance of insects has declined, possibly by an astounding 75% during the past 50 years. Nevertheless, the time, expertise and resources to monitor a highly diverse number of threatened species simply does not exist. There is therefore an urgent need for conservation frameworks that allows ecological insights in connectivity to be generalized in scale from a limited number of species to entire communities. We are working on several projects towards such a multidisciplinary conservation framework, integrating both genomic and ecological approaches.
Wild bees are excellent model organisms for such integration of landscape genomics with functional ecology at a range of spatial scales: (1) bees are central place foragers with restricted foraging ranges linked to local conditions (2) the ecology and life history traits of most bee species is relatively well known (3) the diversity within bee communities changes abruptly along even modest climatic gradients so that sampling is straightforward and (4) bees have small genomes (c. 250Mb) making it economical to use high-throughput sequencing. Depending on the interest of the candidates, we have an either ecological or genomic focused MSc positions available. The ecological MSc position will require in-field identifications of pollinators and/ or identification in lab, and statistical analysis in R. The genomic MSc position will require sample collection, laboratory work with a strong focus on bioinformatic analyses.
These MSc positions present different combinations of laboratory work, fieldwork and ecological or genomic analyses. An interest in- and experience with laboratory techniques, pollinator ecology and identification, sample collection, bioinformatic approaches, command line programming and/or population genetic analyses is therefore highly recommended.
The MSc positions will be associated with the Archaeogenomics research group at UiO and the MATNAT funded BEEDIVERSE project.
Supervisor team:
Bastiaan Star (CEES, UiO)
Emma Falkeid (PhD candidate, CEES, UiO)
Marianne S. Torvanger (PhD candidate, CEES, UiO)
Collaborators:
Markus S. Sydenham (NINA)
Anders Nielsen (NIBIO)