Postdoc for Urchin Mass Mortality

The Helmholtz-Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) is a new institute on interdisciplinary marine biodiversity research, established on the campus of the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. It joins the scientific profiles of the Institute of Chemistry and Biology of Marine Systems (ICBM) Oldenburg and the Alfred Wegener Institute - Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research Bremerhaven (AWI).
- PostDoc for Urchin mass mortality (HIPP25 Pos #3) (M/F/d)

**Overview**
In order to address questions of global importance related to functional marine biodiversity, marine conservation and effective governance, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB) has created an integrative postdoc pool, HIPP. This aims to stimulate a holistic, innovative and interdisciplinary research environment to attend to the most pressing questions facing the marine environment: for nature and people combined, The HIPP offers postdoctoral scientists the opportunity to develop their own research ideas and to actively shape their scientific careers. For each call, we set a topical context in order to foster interconnection and collaborations between postdocs.

For this call, we seek to hire a strong team of researchers, open and enthusiastic about interdisciplinary work, who will address the theme of “Making sense of tipping points for biodiversity: ecosystem and societal perspectives“ in collaboration with the broader HIFMB community. We envisage a cohort that jointly develops novel research approaches to tipping elements in both natural and societal dimensions. Each of the subprojects (outlined below) shall explicitly work with concepts of connectivity and isolation as well as scale (local to regional). We explicitly encourage asking whether adaptation and adapting - for environments and people - allows avoiding tipping in either emergent properties or single aspects of ecological systems or societal worlds. The entire cohort involves 5 subprojects with 1 postdoc position each.

**Background**
The significant ongoing change in Earth’s biosphere and the prospect of increasing pressure from climate change on the environment and society require attention. One of the most widely discussed and used concepts is the threshold concept — with the core idea of preventing tipping points to irrevocable change by staying within ‘safe operating spaces’.

In the discourse on planetary boundaries, it has been stated that the Earth has exceeded 6 out of 9 critical planetary boundaries due to anthropogenic impacts. Many questions arise regarding the scale of such boundaries of measurement (global boundaries versus regional and local processes, scale of management) and our ability to predict threshold pressure levels in relation to safe operating spaces. These questions become even more important in the topic of biodiversity change. Multiple dimensions of ecological processes may impair the detectability of tipping behaviour in the environment. At the same time, ecology has already developed a much better understanding of scale-transcending interactions between local processes (species interactions, tolerance to environmental change) and regional processes (dispersal, movement) that shape biodiversity (e.g. in terms of metacommunity concepts). One of the exciting results of this research is that biodiversity loss can be prevented both by spatial rescue effects (immigration of new biodiversity) between localities or by local adaptation within, but both processes affect each other.

Moreover, when the concept of tipping points (in the narrow sense of characterizing certain dynamics) is moved towards the policy domains, novel constructs emerge. Limits are suggested, recommended, promoted and even enforced through socio-political processes. They are made by people, and also impact people (unequally and not always positively), complicating potential action of environmental measures. For societies, there is also a relationship between the global and the local in governance, i.e. are the problems facing specific sites in the oceans best governed through focus on the oceans themselves or rather on the drivers of these changes which may derive far beyond these areas, on land? A critical question is also when societies themselves are “tipped” into action. What role does time play in responding to a changing world?

**Tasks**
Subproject 3 will address the recent urchin mass mortality event has been spreading from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean, Red Sea and is affecting various locations on the east coast of Africa. Recent studies reported that mainly urchins of the genus Diadema have been affected with mortality, which die within 2-3 days (Diadema setosum, Diadema savignyi). Mortality rate in most populations has been 65 -90%. Recent reports from Zanzibar, Tanzania, indicate that other urchins are also affected (Echinothrix mathai), increasing the impact on reef communities. Urchins have been recog