Graduate research assistantship

Two graduate research assistant positions are available for incoming PhD students in the Suding lab at the University of California Irvine:
COEXISTENCE AND PLANT-SOIL FEEDBACKS IN ALPINE TUNDRA. A graduate research assistantship is available to develop a research project exploring questions related to how the availability of different forms of nitrogen influence competitive dynamics among alpine plant species, how the different quality of secondary carbon compounds produced by plants influence microbial dynamics, and the implications of these feedbacks on plant community structure and diversity. Field work would be based on Niwot Ridge near Boulder, Colorado (http://www.colorado.edu/mrs/ ).
RESPONSE OF CALIFORNIA ECOSYSTEMS TO ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE. A second graduate research assistantship is available to work on a project investigating the impact of shifting precipitation, nutrient, and fire regimes on the response of four ecosystems (grassland, coastal sage scrub, ponderosa pine forest, pinyon-juniper woodland) in Southern California. A graduate student would have the opportunity to investigate the physiological, demographic, competitive and/or biogeochemical controls on ecological responses. This project is in collaboration with Michael Goulden in the Earth System Science department at University of California Irvine (www.ess.uci.edu/~goulden/).
Suding’s research focuses on plant-soil feedbacks and species interactions, and their role in coexistence, invasion and restoration success (see http://sudinglab.bio.uci.edu/ ). Students will be based in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (http://ecoevo.bio.uci.edu/ ) and involved with the global change ecology group (http://globalchange.bio.uci.edu/ ) at UC Irvine. Funding is guaranteed for five years with a mixture of RA, TA, and fellowship support. The UC Irvine campus is located approximately half way between Los Angeles and San Diego, biking distance to the Pacific Ocean and one- two hours drive to mountain and desert areas.
If interested, please contact Katharine Suding (ksuding@uci.edu) with a curriculum vitae, test scores, and research interests. Departmental deadline for application is January 15th, 2005.