Postdoctoral Position AgNUe

The French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) is a public research institution with a community of 12,000 staff, more than 200 research units and 42 experimental units across France. INRAE is among the world’s leading institutions in agricultural and food sciences, plant sciences and animal sciences. Its research develops solutions for agriculture that delivers across multiple performance goals, high-quality food, and the sustainable management of resources and ecosystems.

YOUR ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES

You will join the ECOSYS Joint Research Unit (UMR ECOSYS) in Palaiseau. As part of the AgNUE project, you will help quantify nitrogen losses and assess nitrogen use efficiency in arable cropping systems. Your work will draw on experiments at Grignon, an ICOS-labelled station (FR-Gri) with continuous measurements of CO₂ and H₂O exchange and environmental variables. Working with the scientific and technical team, you will be responsible for monitoring the AgNUE experiments at Grignon and processing and analysing the data. You will combine the project’s new measurements with ICOS observations to establish the nitrogen budget and understand how it varies with weather conditions and crop management practices.

Your main responsibilities will be to:

• Monitor the experiments regularly: prepare and carry out fieldwork, organise progress meetings with the team, and ensure measurement continuity and quality.

• Help install and commission the equipment with support from the engineers, then monitor its operation. Measurements include fluxes using automated chambers, gradient methods and eddy covariance, ambient gas concentrations using spectroscopic analysers, meteorological data and ancillary measurements, including nitrogen in soils and plants.

• Perform quality control, process and analyse project data: calculate gas fluxes, analyse sensor measurements and sample results, and assess the associated uncertainties.

• Analyse how nitrogen fluxes respond to management practices and environmental conditions. Where appropriate, use a nitrogen cycle model to interpret observations and estimate missing data.

• Establish the nitrogen budget by integrating inputs, exports, gaseous emissions, changes in stocks and nitrate leaching estimated from measured concentrations and drainage. Work with the Estrées-Mons team to compare results while accounting for the experimental designs and practices specific to each site.

• Disseminate results through scientific publications, reports and presentations, and contribute to supervising interns where applicable. 

Working conditions: based in Palaiseau, with weekly travel to Grignon and occasional travel to Estrées-Mons; regular fieldwork; a category B driving licence is required. Regular exchanges with Danish partners will include videoconferences in English and participation in an annual project meeting. 

CANDIDATE PROFILE

Recommended background: biogeochemistry, agronomy, ecology, soil science, micrometeorology or environmental science.

Minimum qualification: PhD.

Desired knowledge: nitrogen cycling, N₂O and NH₃ emissions, nitrate leaching and flux measurements; R/Python, time series analysis and statistics.

Relevant experience: field experiments and instrumentation, particularly gas analysers, measurement chambers or eddy covariance.

Skills and attributes: rigour, independence, organisational and analytical skills, teamwork, and proficiency in scientific English.