Doctoral Position | Kiel | Germany
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel is advertising for a PHD student to work on 'Acoustic remote sensing of habitats inside and outside rising offshore wind farms'.
Position description
Offshore wind farms can cause significant changes to seabed habitats and it is important to document and understand these changes. Hydroacoustic technologies are promising tools for mapping these changes. Therefore, the successful candidate will develop and apply hydroacoustic habitat mapping, with focus on multibeam, subbottom profiler, and customized multispectral surveys. The data will be linked to ground truth data to image and classify habitats within and around emerging offshore wind farms. The main objectives are i) to collect hydroacoustic data in the German North Sea, in particular pre-site data collected during the exploration of wind farm sites; ii) to analyse these data and classify them into different domains; iii) to resurvey areas currently surrounded by wind farms; iv) to design and implement hydroacoustic methods tailored to the given habitats; and v) to classify the data using machine learning algorithms and GIS to build habitat models and interpret the data. Expected Results: (i) specific guidelines on how to acoustically sense the given habitat; (ii) spatio-temporal understanding of habitat evolution around wind farms; (iii) highly improved habitat mapping and interpretation.
Supervisors
Prof. Dr. Sebastian Krastel (Kiel University), sebastian.krastel@ifg.uni-kiel.de Dr. Jens Schneider (Kiel University), jens.schneider@ifg.uni-kiel.de
The BETTER project
The PhD is part of The BETTER project, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe programme (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Doctoral Network). This calls for applications for 11 fully funded Doctoral Candidates (DC), with attractive complementary training activities and associated research and travel budgets and the enrollment in graduated schools with the opportunity to get the PhD title. The aim of BETTER is to train a new generation of professionals in the field of Offshore Wind Farming (OWF).
Application deadline
The closing date for applications is 23 March, 2025.
For further information please visit the website here. The specific PhD above is listed as DC 9: Acoustic remote sensing of habitats within and outside rising offshore wind farms.
