PhD: Spatial Optimization of Land Use in Brazil

PhD:
Spatial Optimization of Land Use in Brazil

Faculty:
Faculty of Geosciences Department:
Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning Hours per week: 36 to 40 Final date to receive applications: 13 October 2026

Do you care about the impacts of land use in ecologically sensitive regions of the world? Are motivated to explore how rearranging land use can minimize negative impacts and maximize the positive ones for different stakeholder groups, as a basis for policy making? Are you interested in spatial optimization algorithms and uncertainty assessment? Then this PhD position at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning of Utrecht University may be for you!

The MATOPIBA region in the Brazilian Cerrado is of major national and global importance: it is one of South America’s most agriculturally productive landscapes, a biodiversity hotspot, and home to Indigenous people, Quilombola, smallholder farmers, and large agribusinesses among others. Therefore, future land use strategies in MATOPIBA require balancing agricultural production with biodiversity conservation and social justice, while also accounting for effects of climate change.

In this position, you will contribute to such land use strategies by quantifying the synergies and trade-offs between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation for different land use configurations and stakeholder preferences. Hereto, you will compute Pareto frontiers with spatial optimization algorithms.

More specifically, you will:

• Travel to Brazil to interact with various stakeholders in land use in MATOPIBA;
• Translate stakeholders’ preferences in terms of ‘productive agriculture’ and ‘healthy biodiversity’ into quantifiable impact indicators;
• Develop a spatial optimization algorithm that finds land use configurations that optimize these indicators;
• Compute Pareto frontiers under different climate and socio-economic scenarios to evaluation the robustness of land use solutions for all stakeholder groups; and
• Write academic articles and policy documents that summarize the above to generate and disseminate knowledge on the possible pathways to sustainable land use futures in MATOPIBA.

This PhD position is part of the project “Frontiers of MATOPIBA landscapes”, which examines how agricultural production and biodiversity conservation can be balanced in Brazil’s MATOPIBA region under future climate and socio-economic conditions. It has the aim to support evidence-based decisions to form sustainable, just, climate-resilient land use strategies that protect biodiversity, food security, and local livelihoods.

The project isfully funded through the Dutch Research Agenda and the Brazilian research council CNPq . Within the project, you will closely collaborate with another PhD candidate at Utrecht University on stakeholder perspectives, several consortium members in Brazil, and the Department of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University.

We are looking for candidates with:

• An MSc degree in (or nearing completion of) an MSc program in Geoinformatics, Computer Science, (Quantitative) Geography, (Spatial / Geographic) Data Science, Environmental Science, or a related discipline;
• An interest in the impacts of land use;
• Experience in handling spatial data;
• Programming experience in Python, and/or R;
• Proficiency in English; and
• The ability to work as part of an interdisciplinary research team.

The following qualifications are desirable but not required:

• Experience with (spatial) optimization;
• Experience with land use (change) impact assessment; or
• Proficiency in Portuguese.

We offer:

• a position (1.0 FTE) for 1 year, with an extension to a total of four years upon a successful assessment in the first year, and with the specific intent that it…