진학프로석·박사 채용 접수 플랫폼

The Laboratory of Microbial Ecology and Biogeography (https://kohoutlab.com/), is looking for a motivated postdoctoral fellow. The person will join the consortium of the Excellence Research Centre Project “INTER-MICRO” that aims to identify global patterns of alien fungal introductions and invasions with consecutive effects on ecosystem processes.

Within the project, the person will be involved in the study of the structure and function of plant-associated or soil fungal communities using our in-house global databases of fungal taxa (namely GlobalFungi (https://globalfungi.com/; Vetrovsky et al. 2020, Sci Data 7) and GlobalAMFungi (https://globalamfungi.com/; Vetrovsky et al. 2023, New Phyt 240) databases) as well as newly collected samples from various environments.

The new postdoc will also gain from our long-term research collaboration with prof. Petr Baldrian (head of the Laboratory of Environmental Microbiology) and prof. Petr Pyšek from the Institute of Botany, Czech Academy of Science.

Project summary:

• • Invasive alien species introduced by humans outside their native distributions pose a major threat to global biodiversity and economies. Research on the drivers of invasion processes in alien plants and animals has demonstrated high context dependence, complicating the transferability of these findings to other organisms, such as alien fungi. Although numerous invasive alien fungal pathogens have highly detrimental effects on populations of indigenous species, the mechanisms behind fungal invasions have received little attention.
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• • In recent years, our team has made significant contributions to the growing field of fungal biogeography by identifying global drivers of fungal species distributions and diversity. Notably, we successfully developed the largest atlases of fungal species distribution (GlobalFungi and GlobalAMFungi databases). This work provides sufficient information on the distribution of enough fungal taxa to initiate a comprehensive effort to identify alien fungal taxa introduced outside their native ranges on a global scale.
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• • This project seeks to address several questions: How can we reliably determine the alien status of fungal species? What is the global extent and diversity of invasive alien fungal introductions? How do fungal species traits, the environmental characteristics of recipient ecosystems, and propagule pressure contribute to the invasion success of alien fungi? The project proposes new methodological approaches to identify alien and invasive alien fungal taxa and assess the relative contributions of fungal species traits, environmental characteristics, and propagule pressure to the invasion process.