Associate Professor Mike Dietze to deliver NSF Distinguished Lecture
On September 27 Associate Professor Mike Dietze will deliver the Distinguished Lecture for the National Science Foundation, hosted by the Directorate for Biological Sciences and Division of Biological Infrastructure. His talk is entitled “Solving the Challenge of Predicting Nature: How Close Are We and How Do We Get There.”
Is nature predictable? If so, how can we better manage and conserve ecosystems? Near-term ecological forecasting is an emerging interdisciplinary research area that aims to improve researchers’ ability to predict ecological processes on timescales that can be validated and updated.
Professor Dietze will discuss the challenges and opportunities in near-term ecological forecasting, which span advances in environmental monitoring, statistics and cyberinfrastructure. He will present a framework to understand the predictability of ecological processes and highlight ongoing efforts to build an ecological forecasting community of practice.
Professor Dietze will address the current state of and potential for developing forecasts for a wide range of ecological processes, including:
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- Vegetation phenology and land-surface fluxes
- Ticks, tick-borne disease and small mammal hosts
- Soil microbiome
- Aquatic productivity and algal blooms
- Advancing statistical and informatic tools for ecological forecasting.