Some new Ph.D. positions

The new call for the 2019 doctoral position is out. I am interested in topic "D1/D2 - Agricultural, Environmental and hydro-meteorological sciences and engineering”. There are a few available doctoral grants which will be given to a selection of applicants, according to the rule specified in the call. I am interested in students who wants actively collaborate to the WATZON Prin Project. So please peruse the WATZONE project's pages to write your personal  project which the appllication requires.

Overview of the state of art of our topic

Plants water-use strategies are driven by plant functional traits (PFT) (examples are leaf size, toughness and longevity, seed size and dispersal mode, canopy height and structure, capacity for nitrogen fixation) (Mitchell et al., 2008) and in recent years, plant-physiology studies provided an increasingly detailed knowledge of plants behaviour (Schymanski and Or, 2017), but only some of them started to be inserted in ecohydrological models (e.g. Fatichi et al., 2016). Models simulating plant-hydraulic processes are still rare and confined to specific studies (Hölä et al., 2009; Mackay et al., 2015; Nikinmaa et al., 2014). Other studies account explicitly for topographic attributes and lateral water and mass exchanges (Ivanov et al., 2008; Shen et al., 2013; Tague et al., 2013), but their treatment of plant processes is often oversimplified (Zhou et al., 2013). In mountain terrain, even the effect of plot-scale (0.01-0.1 km2) spatial variability of the energy fluxes is still largely not understood (Rollinson and Kaye, 2015) notwithstanding pioneering stud- ies which account for various feedbacks are available, which show that vegetation productivity and water use do not change linearly through spatial gradients (Niedrist et al., 2016).
Research questions addressed

1.  How specific plant water-use strategies can be implemented in hydrological models ?,
2. Which is the relative role of biotic (PFT) versus abiotic (soils, topography, climate) processes in determining the spatial and temporal variability of ET and soil water?
3.  Which is the right level of complexity necessary in models to upscale R3 results from plants to catchments?
4. How to take advantage of a combination of advanced multi-sensor, multiscale observations to constrain eco-hydrological models and improve their spatial accuracy?
5. How to leverage recent theories of transport to implement the solutes dynamics in plants ?


Other information

The candidate will take care of implementing, besides the code, the appropriate procedures for continuous integration of the evolving source code, and s/he will be also asked to maintain a regular rate of commits to the common open platform. Despite these conditions, and being free and open source, the code will be intellectual property by the coder. This will be guaranteed also by the components-based infrastructure offered by OMS3, which allows to better define the contributions of anyone.
The implementation part will be followed, accompanied by testing activities, either for mathematical consistency, and for physical consistency with experiments and field measurements.
The Ph.D. student is intended to produce, besides working and tested codes, also at least three papers in major journals (VQR Class A), of which, at least one as first Author.
All the code developed will be done in Github (or similar platform), inside the GEOframe community and will be Open Source according to the GPL v3 license.

The candidate will take care of implementing, besides the code, the appropriate procedures for continuous integration of the evolving source code, and s/he will be also asked to maintain a regular rate of commits to the common open platform. Despite these conditions, and being free and open source, the code will be intellectual property by the coder. This will be guaranteed also by the components-based infrastructure offered by OMS3, which allows to better define the contributions of anyone.The implementation part will be followed, accompanied by testing activities, either for mathematical consistency, than for physical consistency with experiments and field measurements.The Ph.D. student is intended to produce, besides working and tested codes, also at least three papers in major journals (VQR Class A), of which, at least one as first Author. Duration of the doctoral studies is three years.

Further information of the policies of the research group can be found:

• To my students
• Working with us
• The scaring version of “working with us"
• About doing a Ph.D.
• Why Open Source ?
• Going beyond the present state of Art Of Hydrological Modeling (since 2011 but still valid)

P.S. - I am also considering:

• Applicants who wants to apply to build the new GEOtop snow model but with attention to forest-snow interactions.
• Who wants to work on the infrastructure of the OMS3, GEOframe systems.
• Who wants to exploit the capabilities of the GEOframe system to pursue the modelling of the river Adige (and/or other rivers in the world), including human infrastructures.