Plant thermal tolerances across scales: from a single tree to global trends

About the Project

Applications are invited for this exciting, fully-funded, 42 month PhD studentship at the University of Aberdeen. This project is part of the newly established Anthony & Margaret Johnston Centre for Doctoral Training in Plant Sciences enabled by a generous legacy gift.

Changing climates pose risks to plants worldwide. To better understand these risks and plan mitigations around them, we need more data on the range of temperatures that plants can tolerate and how they cope with both high and low temperature extremes. This PhD project will combine fieldwork and data synthesis to extend a high-profile global dataset of plant thermal tolerances and model plant responses to complex patterns of thermal exposure, starting with a single tree in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, and scaling up to global patterns across all land plants.

Background

The supervisory team recently published the most comprehensive global database of plant thermal tolerances to date (Lancaster and Humphreys 2020). ... The data will be released in an interactive web format.

Field data collection (One Tree)

The student will conduct fieldwork and measure thermal responses to microclimatic variation across the whole tree during two field seasons in Brazil...

Analysis

The student will model time series temperature and land use data to discover how variation in environmental temperature shapes global variation in thermal tolerances...