Michael Dietze
Professor of Earth & Environment
Michael Dietze is a Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Earth & Environment in the College of Arts & Sciences. He leads the Ecological Forecasting Lab, which focuses on improving our ability to understand and predict ecological systems. His research explores how iterative forecasting—continually updated with new data—can accelerate environmental science and enhance its relevance to society, particularly in areas such as nature-based climate solutions. The lab tackles these challenges using a balanced approach that integrates novel statistical methods, numerical modeling, and ecoinformatics tools. He is also the author of Ecological Forecasting.
Much of the current work in the lab is organized under two broad umbrellas, the Ecological Forecasting Initiative (EFI) and the PEcAn project. EFI is a global interdisciplinary community of practice, with a specific focus on iterative approaches, that Dietze helped launch and has served as the founding director & committee chair. The lab’s work on iterative forecasting is focused on addressing overarching questions about ecological predictability while developing forecasts for a wide range of ecological processes (vegetation phenology and land-surface fluxes; ticks, tick-borne disease, and small mammal hosts; soil microbiome; aquatic productivity and algal blooms; forest pests) and advancing statistical and informatics tools for ecological forecasting. PEcAn is focused more specifically on the terrestrial carbon cycle, improving our capacity for carbon MRV (monitoring, reporting, verification), forecasting, data assimilation, and multi-model benchmarking and calibration within the land component of Earth System models.
Research Interests
- Ecological Forecasting
- Data Assimilation
- Terrestrial Carbon Cycle