Responses of multi-trophic aquatic communities to environmental change

Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem

Biológia Doktori Iskola

Vad Csaba Ferenc

biológiai tudományok

"Freshwater ecosystems are increasingly threatened by climate change (e.g., rising temperatures, heatwaves, and droughts) and anthropogenic pressures (e.g., pollution, nutrient loading, overexploitation). In the past decades, several studies have focused on how individual functional groups respond to these stressors, but their effects on cross-trophic level species interactions remain less understood. By altering trophic relationships, these stressors can lead to changes in community structure and functioning.
Food web models are useful tools for understanding the functioning, stability, and vulnerability of communities and ecosystems. However, most existing food web studies focus on local food webs sampled at a single or few time points and hence we are lacking evidence on food web dynamics in space and time. This limits our ability to predict how food web interactions and structural properties respond to environmental and human-induced gradients.
This PhD project aims to investigate how freshwater community composition and food web structure vary along environmental gradients. The project will utilize previously collected large-scale data of freshwater lakes as well as targeted experiments to construct simple food web models based on abundance and functional trait data and analyse how food web structure shifts along environmental gradients. "

2 fő

HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, Institute of Aquatic Ecology

2026-05-31

English

"- Sound knowledge of English (speaking and writing) - Excellent ability of working alone and in a team Useful: - Theoretical and practical knowledge in basic statistics - Theoretical and practical background in community ecology"