While being a member of the research school, you will be employed at the Arctic University Museum of Norway, UiT. You will conduct research as a part of the newly established Norwegian Centre for Arctic Ecosystem Genomics (ArcEcoGen) and will be part of the terrestrial working group. Research at the ArcEcoGen focuses on the combined effect of humans, climate, and biota on northern ecosystem dynamics in the past, present, and future using environmental DNA (eDNA) techniques. A key goal of ArcEcoGen is to build up a diverse, rigorous, and internationally leading research group in ecosystem genomics. Norway has among the world best cover of local flora and fauna in DNA reference libraries, with near 20 000 species barcoded. In addition, the large natural history collections at The Museum will be available for creating complementary reference libraries. Our collections also include sediment samples from arctic and alpine lakes as well as important archeological finds linked to pre-historic times of Northern Norway. We also have fully equipped laboratories and infrastructure for recovery and analyses of modern, ancient, and eDNA, as well as field equipment for sediment coring. The shift from hunting to the domestication of reindeer in Arctic Europe is a multifaceted human and socio-ecological story that has yet to be fully unravelled. However, there are opportunities to tackle both cultural and environmental aspects from well-preserved archaeological materials in Northern Norway using new techniques. This project will be connected to an existing PhD studying the genomic basis of eco-evolutionary responses to changing environments in arctic plant-herbivore systems but expand more into human interactions using sedaDNA and archaeological data. It will address the relative importance of reindeer, sheep, and other domesticates (including food crops and wild plants) as well as fishing and hunting in the Arctic diets of the past in different cultural contexts. The approach will be multi-tiered using several genomic techniques including metabarcoding, shotgun sequencing and possibly target-capture. This may be supplemented by using genome-wide SNP genotyping of suitable reindeer samples. Both the full domesticated and wild assemblages as well as reindeer provenance/lineage relate strongly to the cultural history of reindeer exploitation and lifeways. An overarching question of great ecological and cultural importance is the representation of reindeer as a keystone species over time during which it was semi-domesticated.
Plus d’informations :
[Website Arctic University of Norway]