PhD in environmental science

Project title: Vegetation-fire interactions in Africa during the Holocene/nSupervisors: Sandy P. Harrison, Sarah Ivory, I. Colin Prentice/nProject Overview:/nRecords of past environmental changes provide an opportunity to understand how ecosystems, and the services they provide, have responded to climate changes outside the range experienced in the recent historical past; this understanding is useful in anticipating how ecosystems might respond to future changes. Pollen records from sites across Africa, for example, document fundamental changes in vegetation during the past 12,000 years. The drivers of these changes are complex, involving multiple interactions between climate, human activity, and natural disturbance including wildfire. Previous attempts to document and analyse the causes of vegetation changes across the African continent through time have been hampered by limited data availability. The ever-increasing amount of pollen and charcoal data now available, coupled with advances in reconstruction techniques, provide a basis for a new continent-wide synthesis of vegetation and wildfire changes during the Holocene. The goal of the PhD is to reconstruct vegetation and wildfire regimes across the African continent during the Holocene, and to use these reconstructions to analyse the causes of the observed changes and the relative importance of climate change and human activities as drivers of these changes on different timescales./nThe PhD project is expected to start May 2026. The student will be part of the SPECIAL group, an interdisciplinary research team based in Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Reading. The PhD is funded through the Horizon Europe grant to the project “Ecological Archaeologies of the Afrotropics (EcoArch)” and the student will have the opportunity to interact with other members of the project based in the University of Oslo, Penn State University, and research centres across Africa. Although the PhD is computationally based, there may also be opportunities to participate in EcoArch fieldwork activities.