PhD in Ecology (up to 4 years) 80 %

The position is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation project “A mechanistic theory of functional responses: zooming into movement behaviour to understand and predict predator prey interactions”.­
Ecological communities are home to many different species that interact with each other. These interactions control how energy and resources flow through ecosystems, which affects how ecological communities function and maintain stability. A key factor influencing how populations interact is how the strength of their interactions changes based on population density. This relationship is called the functional response (FR), and its shape significantly impacts whether interacting populations will coexist, collapse, or cycle. While functional responses are commonly used in practical applications (like pest management) and ecological theory (such as food web models), we don't understand how individual animal movement and behavior create these patterns. To tackle this knowledge gap, our research project addresses two main challenges:­
1. Develop a scalable method that uses movement behavior in both single-prey and multi-prey situations to predict functional responses across different predator-prey pairs.­
2. Understand the mechanisms that change the shape of functional responses and how these changes affect the stability of the predators and their prey.