Statisticien pour l'Inventaire Forestier Français

Researcher in statistics - Specialized in statistical sampling and forest inventory French National Institute for Geographic and forest information (IGN) - Laboratory of Forest Inventory (LIF) – Nancy (France)

Tentative profile for dissemination in view of competitive recruitment early 2018  

Status

Permanent position (French “CDI”), open to international applications.

Modalities and schedule

Competitive recruitment, engaged early 2018 for an appointment from June to later months of 2018.

Brut salary

Salary of “expert” position (from 40 to 55 €/month) depending on expertise and seniority, to be negotiated with IGN

Location Nancy, 14 rue Girardet, 54000 Nancy, France – https://sites.google.com/site/LabForestInventory

Positioning of researches

A main mission of the Laboratory of Forest Inventory (LIF) is to contribute to optimizing the permanent national forest inventory program, created in 1958, and currently conducted by IGN. This optimization aims at increasing the efficiency and precision of the forest inventory as well as reducing its costs, and requires developments on the sampling design and its stratification, measurement protocols, and associated statistical estimators.

It must also contribute to turn the national forest inventory a privileged monitoring tool for forest ecosystems in a highly transitional context (forest expansion, bio-economy strategy, climatic change) that forms an essential research orientation of the future joint research unit INRA/IGN “B2IF” (Biogeochemistry, Inventory and Indicators for Forest ecosystems) to which LIF laboratory will be associated.

A second mission is to contribute to the development of current researches on new quantitative methods for the analysis of forest resources, based on the national forest inventory program, and allowing 1) the temporal projection of forest resources over the longer term (> 50 years) that requires defining appropriate partitioning of the forests, developing large-scale forest dynamics models, and quantifying the uncertainties associated to temporal projections, 2) to increase the resolution and precision in the assessment of forest attributes from NFI sampling points and auxiliary spatialized information (downscaling), by developing and implementing a so-called “multisource” inventory.

Hiring a specialized researcher in statistical sampling and inference will enable a contribution to developing and optimizing current forest inventory methodologies, and bring support to emerging multi-source inventory and temporal projection methods, and therefore reinforce current activities of the laboratory.

Main missions The recruited researcher will have, as main missions:

1. To pursue the optimization of the national forest inventory program, and in particular already implemented changes, including i) sampling design (set up of a temporarily renewed sample), ii) optimization of statistical data acquisition (imputation methods, model-based inference), iii) post-stratification of statistical estimators based on remote sensing information, iv) development of estimators associated to these innovations, while replacing these contributions in an international framework (European national forest inventory network, ENFIN, EU-funded project Diabolo) in order to ensure dissemination and publication,

1. To contribute to developments and statistical estimators associated to emerging methodologies for resource quantification under study at the laboratory, 1) in their spatial dimension, the multi-source national forest inventory (MS-NFI) aiming at producing more accurate and regionalized estimates of forest resources, using remote sensing satellite, A-Lidar information and other auxiliary information, 2) in their temporal dimension, methods of resource projection based on large-scale dynamic models,

1. To contribute to prospective for the design of a new forest inventory for the equatorial forests of French Guyana (8 Mha) that should soon term a new mission of the French NFI,

1. To contribute to integrate novel data collected on the national forest inventory program in the information produced by the inventory program, turning it a reliable and updated monitoring tool of forests in their environment. Integration of outputs related to forest biomass and carbon are a priority based on recently initiated projects,

Requested profile

Researcher in statistics or environmental biometrics specialized in sampling methods and inferential statistics.

The researcher will also engage in ensuring an operational ling with services in charge of the national forest inventory.

Ability to speak French or strong wish to learn it desired.