Location: University of Florida, West Florida Research and Education Center (WFREC)

Anticipated Start: Spring 2026

Anticipated Salary: $30,000 plus tuition waiver

Application Deadline: Open until filled

Position Description: Invasive species significantly alter fire regimes, impacting fire risk in the southeastern USA. Current fuel models often overlook invasive species, leading to inaccurate fire risk assessments and management decisions. The student will lead a Joint Fire Sciences funded project to address this gap by developing new fuel models that incorporate the impacts of invasive species on fire behavior. The student will collect temporally explicit field data on fuel parameters associated with different levels of plant invasion for multiple species, develop custom fuel models used to parameterize fire behavior models, and use large-scale available data on invasive species occurrence and wildfires to assess changes in fire regimes region wide. The field component of the study will be conducted in two locations within the Gulf Coast region: Grand Bay National Wildlife Refuge and University of Florida’s Jay Research Facility. The student will be expected to lead field work, collect and compile remotely sensed data, conduct quantitative statistical analyses, present their findings at relevant scientific conferences, complete relevant course work, and publish their findings in the peer-reviewed literature. The student will work closely with students and scientists from other labs at the University of Florida and Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve as part of a regional team.

Preferred Qualifications: The successful candidate will have a BS and MS degree in ecology or a related field, a valid driver’s license, experience with fuel sampling, fire behavior modeling, and with R and GIS for statistical and spatial analyses. In addition, they will have strong writing, communication, leadership, and organization skills and the ability to work independently and as part of a team. Please submit a cover letter explaining why you are pursuing a graduate degree and why you believe our lab is the right fit for you, plus a CV, unofficial transcript, and two references to Carissa Wonkka at c.wonkka@ufl.edu. Submit documents as a single PDF file named “[your last name] PhD JFSP.pdf”.

About us: The Wonkka Lab employs multi-scale experiments to assess the response of functional processes, energy flows, biotic relationships, and biotic-abiotic interactions within ecological communities to common restoration and management techniques. We design studies to understand the interactions among processes, vegetation, soils, insects, animals, and human decision-making that underpin complex social-ecological system dynamics. Our research supports long-term sustainable ecosystem restoration and management that is resilient to global-change related shifts in biophysical and environmental conditions, socio-political conditions, and disturbance regimes.