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Project properties |
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| Title | Functional fire resilience in Amazonian forests |
| Group | Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 36 |
| Supervisor(s) | Dr. Masha van der Sande, David Pacuk (MSc) |
| Examiner(s) | Dr. Masha van der Sande |
| Contact info | David.pacuk@wur.nl
https://www.wur.nl/en/persons/david-pacuk.htm |
| Begin date | 2025/03/01 |
| End date | |
| Description | Also possible as BSc thesis/ BSc internship/ MSc thesis/ MSc internship
Our project is about the resilience of Amazonian forests to fire. We try to understand this resilience based on functional traits, and work with these forests on different scales (e.g., species-level, community-level) to understand their dynamics in relation to fire. What makes one species more resilient to fire than the other? And are there different strategies to this? How does that play out on a community-level? To test these kinds of questions, we use our plot network that is divided over different forest types in Bolivia: the seasonally dry tropical forests of the Chiquitania, and the wet tropical forests of Madidi National Park and Biosphere Reserve Pilón-Lajas. We remeasure our plots on a yearly basis, and each year we also take different types of additional measurements regarding functional traits. Since the work is split between different forest types and different measurement types, we typically have room for several thesis/internship students a year. All that being said, these are very dynamic and complex phenomena that can be studied from many different angles. While we spend most of our time studying it from a tree perspective, there is potential for many other perspectives—like landscape ecology, soil biology, wildlife studies… You name it! If you’re interested in fire ecology in the Amazon and you’re feeling creative, please do also feel free to get in touch. We might be able to figure something out! https://www.wur.nl/en/project/mechanistically-understanding-amazon-fire-resilience.htm Topic(s): Climate change effects / Biodiversity and functional diversity / Population and forest dynamics / Forest restoration and succession / Ecophysiology Region(s): Americas Climate(s): Tropical zone Corona proof: No |
| Used skills | Remote fieldwork, programming in R |
| Requirements | Standard for MSc thesis:
- WEC-31806 Ecological Methods I, or a comparable alternative course; - One FEM course (at least), depending on the topic of the thesis: FEM-30306 Forest Ecology and Forest Management, FEM-30806 Resource Dynamics Sustainable Utilization, FEM-32306 Agroforestry, or Models for Ecological Systems FEM-31806 Standard for BSc thesis minimal 120 credits |