Ifremer is part of the AUFRANDE Australia-France doctoral program supported by EU MSCA Cofund scheme. Under the AUFRANDE 2nd call for applicants, IFREMER currently have 3 PhD positions open in marine science for international candidates.

3 Open PhD Positions:

• DC60 - Extracting Essential Ocean Variables for benthic habitats and fishes from existing mature imaging protocols. This PhD on marine coastal imaging (fishes and benthic habitats) will develop and test a suite of metrics and models to assess the distribution and ecological status of coastal fish communities and benthic habitats, in relation with climate stressors and anthropogenic pressures. It will build from large datasets in coastal imagery, enabling a multiple-scale approach, from local to regional. Finally, it will develop an interoperability framework for observations resulting from distinct imaging protocols. The PhD is a shared supervision between Ifremer/Université de Bretagne Occidentale & University of Tasmania - Supervisors : Dominique Pelletier & Jacquomo Monk Job description : https://aufrande.eu/position/dc60/
• DC61 - A strategic assessment approach to evaluating interactions between offshore wind energy and commercial fisheries. Offshore wind energy has rapidly emerged as a promising source of renewable energy, but it also presents multiple challenges. This includes conflicts with fishing activities, resulting from the competition for space, as well as potential cascading effects resulting from fishing effort displacement, which can result in economic losses for the fishing industry. In the face of this challenge, the current approach to impact assessments and potential compensation has largely borrowed from the project-by-project impact assessment approaches used for land-based industrial developments. Given the fluidity of marine ecosystems and the adaptive capacity of the fishing industry, there is a need to develop systematic assessment methods and tools which enable assessing aggregate impacts across multiple projects, considering the potential interactions between the effects of individual projects. This implies evaluating the dynamics of spatial and economic responses of fishing activities to spatial exclusion, taking into account the ecological, economic and regulatory drivers, which influence these responses, as well as the governance regimes, which could enable integrating such understanding in determining spatial allocation and compensation across sectors. The project will explore the governance dimensions associated with the management of the complex interactions between wind energy development at sea and the structure of fishing activities. The PhD is a shared supervision between Ifremer/Université de Bretagne Occidentale & University of Tasmania - Supervisors: Dr Olivier Thébaud (IFREMER), Dr Emily Ogier (IMAS UTAS), Dr Steve Rust (IMAS UTAS), Prof Marcus Haward (UTAS & Blue Economy CRC), Dr Fabio Boschetti (CSIRO), Dr Alistair Hobday (CSIRO) Job description : https://aufrande.eu/position/dc61/
• DC62 - Understanding and predicting seagrass decline in lagoonal environment. Seagrasses form coastal habitats of high ecological value as they are ecosystem engineers, supporting high levels of biodiversity, improving water quality, protecting coastlines from erosion, storms and floods, and trapping carbon. They have been declining for nearly one century with an estimated annual global loss of 7% (United Nations Environment Programme 2020). In tropical regions, anthropogenic pressures are very high, seagrass decline is high and biodiversity is greatly threatened. This is the case on La Reunion Island in the Southwest Ocean Indian, where seagrasses have been disappearing since 2017, well below the cover documented between 1951 and 2016. The aim of the project is to identify and evaluate the processes impacting seagrass decline on Reunion Island, using physical coastal oceanography methodologies, data sciences applied to ecology, and numerical modelling. The PhD is a shared supervision between Ifremer/Université de Bretagne Occidentale & Queensland University of Technology - Supervisors: Dr Héloïse Muller (IFREMER), Ass Prof Paul Wu (QUT), Tévamie Rungassamy (GIP Réserve Naturelle Nationale Marine de la Réunion) Job description : https://aufrande.eu/position/dc62/

Application Deadline: AUFRANDE second call for applicants will close on 24 January 2024 at 11:59 PM CET (Central European Time)

Find more information and apply through the link below!