Are you holding Master’s degree and looking for PhD positions – Fully Funded PhD Programs in Europe? Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden inviting application for funded PhD Programs or fully funded PhD Scholarship. Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences is one of the largest university in the world with thousands of employees, students, and research scientists are involved in the innovation of science and technology daily.
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences has huge a campus in Sweden and widely known as for its contribution in top notch education and research. The contribution of Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences is not only limited to natural sciences and engineering but it also offers high quality research as well as higher education in bio-medical sciences, social sciences, humanities, psychology, education, architecture etc.
1. Phd student in Biology or Animal Science – Reindeer husbandry
Summary of Doctoral Project:
Reindeer husbandry is a pastoral production system where the reindeer herders make use of animals’ natural adaptation to the environment and their ability to transfer otherwise underutilised resources into meat and other products. Reindeer husbandry is a vital part of Sami culture and society and important for many local communities as well as a number of other indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic. Rapid and pronounced climate change in the Arctic causes distress, challenges and economic uncertainty in the pastoral reindeer herding system of indigenous Sami. Furthermore, competing anthropogenic activities continuously increases and inhibits the flexibility of the system. In this project we will investigate the possibilities and limitations for herders in a northern pastoral system facing increasing external stress to adapt to the effects of climate change. In this PhD-project the graduate student will use 25 years records of reindeer numbers and slaughter from the 51 herding communities in Sweden, and a unique 40-year set of records from 20,000 individually marked calves and their mothers collected from one herding community. Weather events, access to pasture, external land use and herders’ management strategies will be related to reindeer performance and herd productivity over time. The project will be based on a co-production of knowledge approach together with reindeer husbandry. The graduate student will be partly responsible for collecting experience-based knowledge from reindeer herders in Sweden and Norway regarding strategies and selection in reindeer husbandry work and the possibilities for a more developed individual marking system of reindeer.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-15
2. PhD position in Animal Science
Summary of Doctoral Project:
In Sweden, the majority of laying hens is housed in cage-free environments with access to littered floor areas. The littered area increases the behavioural repertoire of the laying hen in a positive way. However, manure accumulating in the litter will increase the ammonia concentration in the indoor air, as nitrogen in the manure is converted to ammonia by bacteria and in chemical processes. The gas ammonia is detrimental for the respiratory tract of both poultry and humans, and ammonia ventilated from barns contributes to acidification and eutrophication. Agriculture accounts for almost 90 percent of the total ammonia emissions to air in Sweden, and it is urgent to find measures to reduce the emissions from animal stables. The present project aims at investigating alternative litter materials and feed compositions with potential to reduce ammonia emission in laying hen facilities.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-15
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3. PhD position Environmental communication in Global South contexts
Summary of Doctoral Project:
Communication research is often equated to media studies, and much of applied communication research evaluates the effectiveness of information transmission or persuasion. At the Division of Environmental Communication, we focus less on such instrumental perspectives of communication. Instead, we start from an understanding of communication as the joint construction of meaning – a process that is multilateral and multimodal, and in which disagreement, conflict and power relationships play important roles, which we aim to elucidate through both our research and teaching. We apply such perspectives to a wide variety of issues of global relevance, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, land use, urban planning and land rights. However, at present, most work at the Division of Environmental Communication focuses on Nordic contexts. To further strengthen environmental communication as a field of research, we are now recruiting a PhD student to explore together with researchers at the Division of Environmental Communication in which ways ideas about environmental communication can be fruitfully applied, made sense of and developed in Global South contexts – and in which ways perspectives from the Global North (that tend to dominate the environmental communication literature) can be re-thought by learning from approaches and understandings coming from the Global South.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-14
4. PhD position in population modelling for endangered species conservation
Summary of Doctoral Project:
The PhD position takes place within the project Can laws save the natural world? funded by the Swedish Research Council VR, which aims to quantitatively understand how endangered species can benefit from nature conservation laws. The project presents a high level of novelty and will provide important implications for conservation. This position, along with a parallel PhD position in environmental law, is one of the key components of the project. Specifically, we are looking for a highly motivated graduate student who will 1) develop quantitative population models of endangered species to align concepts defined in European species conservation law with measurable ecological counterparts that are applicable across many taxa, 2) develop quantitative analyses to document the effects of legal protection on species trends and 3) analyze patterns of biodiversity-related legal aspects across European countries (such as e.g. court cases). The research will involve different taxa but has a clear emphasis on large carnivores, such as wolves, bears and lynx. The PhD position aims to be interdisciplinary, being both intensive in quantitative modelling and requiring an ability to understand legal concepts and their use by stakeholders.
Last Application Date: 21st July 2022
5. PhD position in crop production adaptations to climate change (Subject area: biology with specialization in ecology)
Summary of Doctoral Project:
Extreme weather conditions, such as the heatwaves and dry periods that are hitting many regions, are expected to become even more common in the future. These conditions threaten food security by reducing crop yields and increasing their year-to-year variability. We need to know how to grow our crops such that risks of weather-induced yield losses are reduced, in the field and the landscape. A key challenge is to identify reliable forms of cropping, given the randomness of precipitation and temperature and the complex interactions between crops and growing conditions, in particular under climatic extremes. The successful candidate will exploit a wide range of land-use and climatic data, and, with stochastic and statistical models, quantify how climatic conditions and crop and landscape diversity affect the reliability of crop yields. This knowledge is key to inform climate change adaptation of agriculture. The PhD student will join a world leading team in the field, with researchers working in the areas of plant ecophysiology, hydrology, agronomy and ecology. As a PhD student in biology, the student will carry out supervised research leading to a PhD thesis as well as take PhD courses to the equivalent of at least 30 credits.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-22
How to Write Cover Letter for PhD Program?
6. PhD Rural Development
Summary of Doctoral Project:
Research in resource governance explores questions of politics, justice and sustainability in relation to the extraction and use of natural resources. A large part of such research attempts to link resource-producing regions, often based in the Global South, with markets that tend to be in wealthier Global North countries. The processing and trade across global markets is often understood as a set of inter-linked networks of exchange mediated by unequal patterns of power. Unpacking how different actors relate to the different stages of resource processing can reveal variegated effects on rural, resource-dependent societies as well as the creation of a range of sustainability outcomes. The PhD project aims to critically and creatively investigate understandings of sustainability in iron ore mining justified by the climate crisis. The starting point is the iron ore used in fossil-free steel recently used to manufacture a heavy construction machine for an end customer in Sweden. Fossil-free steel is produced without emitting any carbon emissions from mine to end product thus promising major reductions in carbon emissions, but also raising questions on how other aspects of sustainability related to the iron ore extraction will be addressed. The first part of the PhD project explores broader understandings of sustainability beyond low carbon in the iron ore mining of northern Sweden.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-14
7. PhD-student in Environmental assessment, focus on environmental chemistry
Summary of Doctoral Project:
We are seeking a PhD student, who will develop a multi-residual methodology, from sample preparation to instrumental analysis (target, suspect, non-target approaches) and data evaluation, for chemical identification and screening in influent and effluent wastewaters. The developed methodology will then be implemented to investigate population chemical usage and exposure, and also to evaluate the release of the chemicals and their risks to the environment, over time and space. The workflow developed and dataset acquired will serve as part of the knowledge base for the establishment of Early Warning Systems in Europe. The duties will also include wastewater sampling, sample extraction, data acquisition and evaluation with statistical tools, writing scientific manuscripts and reports for the European Partnership for Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC) in English, participate in PARC meetings, and dissemination of the project results.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-21
8. PhD student, biology – Future Yields- impacts of browsing on stand structure, forest growth and revenue in forestry
Summary of Doctoral Project:
Ungulates provide important ecosystem services, e.g. through hunting and nature tourism, but may also limit other ecosystem services. In particular, ungulate browsing is often viewed as one of the major factors limiting forest growth as well as yields and revenue from forestry. Thus, successful co-management of ungulates and forests is based on finding trade-offs between competing ecosystem services. This, in turn, requires an understanding of ecological relationships between ungulates, their habitats, and various management actions, as well as an understanding of sociological relationships between stakeholders. Furthermore, accurate methods for monitoring actions and goal fulfilment in management are required, as well as systems for monitoring stakeholder attitudes towards the size of game populations, to ecosystem services and to disservices from ungulates.
Last Application Date: 08-08-2022
9. Doctoral student – Secondary materials from wood waste
Summary of Doctoral Project:
The work involves the study of novel thermo-hydro-mechanical processing technologies for extracting secondary materials from different post-consumer wood panels, which are subsequently converted to valuable composite products via a two-fold valorisation approach: fibre reuse, and in the form of fines. Focus will be given on the quality of secondary materials for use in a variety of products and for optimising the technologies. Experiment design and process optimization will be done using statistical and Machine Learning techniques. Collaboration with leading producers of wood products is envisaged as well as with waste managers. The doctoral student combines both PhD-courses and practical research work. Lecturing and course management duties up to 20% of work time in the subject wood science and technology may be possible, with corresponding prolongation of employment time if needed.
Last Application Date: 2022-07-26
10. PhD student in forest ecology
Summary of Doctoral Project:
Are you interested in plant-animal interactions and how to figure out the carrying capacity of a landscape for wild populations of large herbivores? Forestry and ungulate (moose and deer) browsing are both important drivers of forest biodiversity and ecosystem services. To better understand how these factors interact, and to predict the level of browsing damage in production forests, we need to fill some knowledge gaps: how much forage is there in the landscape and how can we measure it in a cost-efficient way? How can we use silviculture to promote forage availability and therefore reduce damage? Which landscape scale factors explain the development of browsing damage over time? We are looking for a person who, as part of a PhD, will address these questions. The doctoral student will be trained in three research fields which are connected in this project: ecology, remote sensing and forest production. The work includes for example field data collection, conducting forest experiments, working with data from remote sensing and the National Forest Inventory. The doctoral student will work with many plant species, relevant for all wild ungulate species living in Sweden. The doctoral student will be part of an active research group, and together we strive to maximize the impact of our research on practical game- and forest management, including outreach activities to forest owners and hunters.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-15
How to Write Motivation Letter for PhD Program?
11. PhD student for 4 years. Biomedical science specialization bacteriology
Summary of Doctoral Project:
Contagious interdigital infection in the cleft palate of cattle so-called digital dermatitis (DD) and footrot/contagious ovine digital dermatitis (CODD) in sheep cause extensive damage to the hooves of affected animals and is very painful. The essential causative agent for footrot is Dichelobacter nodosus but the causes of DD and CODD have not yet been fully identified. There is currently no laboratory diagnosis for DD and CODD, the diagnosis is made clinically by a veterinarian or in connection with trimming of the hooves. However, for footrot, there are PCR diagnostics that confirm the presence of D. nodosus from the lesions in the hooves. Increased studies of the spread and occurrence of DD, footrot/CODD are necessary to gather important knowledge to be able to prevent and treat these diseases in cattle and sheep.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-15
12. PhD student in biology – specialisation in ecology
Summary of Doctoral Project:
Eutrophication or increased nutrient availability is a growing threat for lakes and water resources. This can cause excessive phytoplankton production and harmful algal blooms. While the response of phytoplankton to increased nutrient availability is well studied, the formation and collapse of blooms remains elusive and unpredictable. Phytoplankton can get infected by parasites such as viruses and chytrid fungi, but the influence of such parasitic interactions on phytoplankton blooms have been overlooked. These infections can terminate phytoplankton blooms in a matter of days and influence phytoplankton population size and dynamics. This project will focus on the impacts of such parasitic interactions on freshwater phytoplankton blooms and their role in modulating the fate of phytoplankton biomass in the lake. We will use cultivated model systems, environmental omics, and in-situ microcosms to study these interactions at genome resolution.
Last Application Date: 2022-08-31
