Research and Grant Writing for Coastal Conservation and Blue Carbon Modelling

Volunteering

Contract

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Morobe Development Foundation Inc. is a not-for-profit organization based in Papua New Guinea and was established to promote sustainable community development initiatives and thereby address several exigent issues – ranging from environmental conservation to women's rights – that are hindering the progress of the region.

Mangrove forests play a crucial role globally, supporting the livelihoods of millions of people living along coastlines while contributing significantly to economies worldwide through ecosystem services valued between billions of dollars annually. These services include shoreline stabilization, providing habitats for diverse benthic macrofauna, and supplying food, honey, and timber.

Beyond their economic and social benefits, mangrove forests offer scalable and cost-effective natural climate solutions by sequestering carbon in biomass and soil/sediment. Globally, the potential of mangrove forests to mitigate climate change is significant, with the capacity to offset a substantial percentage of annual fossil fuel emissions through carbon sequestration.

A few of our ongoing projects focus on applications of various remote sensing technologies for monitoring forest biomass, tracking land use land change patterns, evaluating climate change impacts, and conserving sea turtle habitats.

We are currently looking for online volunteers who are passionate about data science and mangroves/sustainability-related topics and are enthusiastic about enhancing their research writing skills (approximately 20 hours per week for 12 weeks) to support us in this research collaboration. The objective of this research is to understand the role of data science applications in coastal conservation and blue carbon modeling in PNG.

The selected online volunteers with a background in data science will support in grant writing and research by collaborating on the climate projections of mangrove response in the next century. For this, R programming skills are needed and additionally contribute to the development of blue carbon models to estimate the amount of carbon sequestered by this ecosystem.

Morobe Development Foundation (MDF) Inc. is looking for Online Volunteers who have expertise in data analysis, R programming knowledge, climate projection, coastal conservation, and carbon emission modeling and a background in the field of data science, preferably also in forestry, mangroves, sustainability, remote sensing, or related areas.

Selected online volunteers would be expected to assist the MDF team with:

1. Data analysis-related and programming tasks for establishing and analyzing coastal conservation and blue carbon modeling- (volunteer 1).
2. Tools development that allows simulating the amount of carbon mangroves will sequester under different climate change scenarios (e.g. sea level rise) ( volunteer 2) (expected tool: R programming tool- statistics analysis)
3. Journal article writing support (drafting preparation and literature review (length: 10-15 pages) )- (volunteer 3).,
4. Grant proposal support (drafting and literature review (length: 8-10 pages) )- (volunteer 4).

The topic of the current research is: "Data science applications for coastal conservation in the context of mangroves and how much carbon emissions they are sequestering (blue carbon modeling)”

The results of this project will be included in a peer-reviewed journal article, and based on the level of contributions, the online volunteers will be acknowledged (with a certificate) and/or invited to be co-authors.

The ideal candidates should have demonstrated writing experience and have a master’s degree or equivalent (e.g., bachelor’s degree with 3+ years) in an area related to data science, R programming, data analysis, climate projection, carbon emissions modeling, forestry, mangroves, sustainability, remote sensing, coastal conservation or related fields.

Must have good communication and be very attentive, responsive, and proactive, as our projects are very fast-paced.

If you would like to be considered, please apply and provide a statement of purpose (~ 200-300 words) highlighting your experience with data analysis, R programming, data science, and writing scientific articles/reports on the aforementioned topics and why you would be the best candidate for this role.

You can find some of our recent publications here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=IH-147kAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

Apply now

Added 10 days ago - Updated 4 hours ago - Source: unv.org