External Job Announcement
Reg.-Nr. 4-11526/23-D
Modern, interconnected, conscious of tradition: Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) is the old-
est and largest university in the State of Saxony-Anhalt with a history dating back more than 500 years. Today
more than 20,000 students are enrolled at the university. MLU’s core research areas are in the nanosciences
and bio-sciences, the Enlightenment, as well as in social and cultural research. The university is also home to
a range of small disciplines, some of which can be found nowhere else in Germany. The university has excel-
lent national and international ties, and works closely together with leading research institutes, industry, and
more than 250 universities around the world.
The Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, in cooperation with the DFG-funded International Research
Training Group GRK 2324 "TreeDì - Tree Diversity Interactions: The role of tree-tree interactions in local
neighbourhoods in Chinese subtropical forests" (www.treedi.de) and the German Centre for Integrative Bi-
odiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, invites applications for the following position, starting 01 June
2024, limited to 3 years:
Doctoral Researcher (m/f/d) on the project
"Bottom-up and top-down drivers of herbivory" (P4G-3)
as part-time employment (65%).
The salary will be up to Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L if the personal requirements and tasks are fulfilled.
The research topic:
Insect herbivores are important moderators of ecosystem structure and functioning. Recent work in the
BEF-China project has shown that insect herbivory increases with increasing tree diversity in biodiverse
subtropical forests. Local tree interactions might explain the observed community-level associations among
herbivores, their enemies, and tree diversity, but are likely modified by the wider tree neighbourhood. However,
the relative importance of potential bottom-up (plant-mediated) and top-down (enemy-mediated) mechanisms
underlying such associational effects, and their scale-dependence, remain unclear. The aim of the project is (1)
to jointly study causes and effects of insect herbivory by (2) analysing the functional composition of, and
interactions among, herbivore communities, their natural enemies, and their host trees using (3) observational
and experimental approaches based on taxonomic and molecular methods in the field and in the lab. The project
is supervised by Prof. Dr. Andreas Schuldt (andreas.schuldt@forst.uni-goettingen.de; https://www.uni-goettin-
gen.de/en/588022.html). The doctoral researcher will be integrated into the working group of Prof. Andreas
Schuldt.
Tasks:
- Task 1: to estimate the leaf area damaged by insect herbivores and to study the effect of herbivory on tree
productivity
- Task 2: to identify insect herbivores and their natural enemies to develop a functional characterization of
key trophic interactions
- Task 3: to experimentally manipulate predator and herbivore communities (e.g. predator attraction, herbi-
vore exclusion experiments).
veröffentlicht am 21.11.2023