Marc Macias-Fauria
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About
Research Area
The Biogeosciences Lab (which is the research group I lead) strives to understand how ecology is coupled with the Earth System, in the form of feedbacks to climate, biogeochemical, or geomorphological processes, for example. It focuses on cold ecosystems (arctic and alpine), is systems-aware (i.e., tries to understand the interactions within coupled biotic-abiotic systems), strongly process-oriented (i.e., focuses on mechanisms), works across scales (i.e., depending on the target suite of processes we may use palaeoecological data, field data, remote sensing data, or all of those), quantitative, solutions-oriented (i.e., we strive to make our science directly useful to real-world applications whenever this is possible), and adheres to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, as reproducibility is a core foundation of science. Please visit my personal profile at SPRI for more detail on our projects and publications: https://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/people/macias-fauria/.
Project Interests
I am particularly keen in finding a PhD student interested in conducting research on ecological interactions with the Earth System, and on the role of megafauna on Arctic tundra vegetation in particular. We study the ability of large animals to engineer and modify habitats and niches, altering the properties of the Earth's surface and feeding back to climate, from local to large scales. We have an ongoing multi-year NERC-funded project based in western Greenland, where this project would be based (with a strong field component). The project would focus on how and how much do caribou and musk oxen drive responses of tundra vegetation to climate change, and how these responses feedback to the climate system. This research line informs Nature-based solutions, rewilding, and the field of biodiversity conservation.
For other ongoing projects, please visit my website.