Long-term changes in wildlife parasite abundance

Are you a master student eager to contribute to research on biodiversity changes? Are you interested in ecological data analysis? Are you curious about parasites?

Human-mediated environmental changes are impacting ecosystems worldwide. These changes affect both where species occur, how abundant they are, and how they interact. Parasites are everywhere (just hard to spot), and they are hyper diverse. They are however often overlooked when assessing how environmental changes affect ecological communities.

With this project we aim to determine whether and how the abundance of animal wildlife parasites has changed over the last century using published long-term records and non-linear regressions. Your tasks will be to

1. extract long-term data from pre-identified sources,
2. analyse trends using advanced statistical models,
3. discuss the results in context of the Anthropocene.

Requirements

Flexible starting period. Project duration at least 4 months. Continuous presence on Texel is not required.

Contact

Interested? Please contact Dr. Cyril Hammoud (cyril.hammoud@nioz.nl) or Prof. Dr. David Thieltges (david.thieltges@nioz.nl).