Ecologist Michael Dietze creates forecasts that can help society avoid climate change disaster
Record-breaking drought. Devastating fires. Over the past few months, the northeastern United States has experienced what many states in the western half of the country are accustomed to: wildfires. This fall in Massachusetts, it was typical to see a haze of smoke smothering the sky, graying the orange and yellow leaves clinging to branches.
The dramatic spike in wildfires, with over 600 fires burning 1,900 acres of land in Massachusetts between October and November, was caused by abnormal drought conditions. A dry fall in the commonwealth is normal, but climate change is pushing seasonal patterns to extremes—making dry periods drier, wet seasons wetter, storms stronger, and fires more intense. If the Northeast must contend with more wildfires, how will that alter delicate ecosystems that we rely on? Could it change forest habitats permanently, or limit their ability to store carbon?
“Fires fundamentally change terrestrial carbon sinks,” says Michael Dietze, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences professor of Earth and environment. Forests are a natural carbon sink, meaning that the carbon emissions are absorbed and stored in their trees and soil underground. “Right now, 50 percent of carbon emissions are taken up by land and water systems, but there’s no guarantee that will remain true,” Dietze says. If it doesn’t, then that means more heat-trapping carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, accelerating climate change past what we’re seeing today.
For Dietze, witnessing the threats of climate change firsthand reinforces his main research question: How can the world better prepare for and predict future environmental scenarios when the natural world is constantly fluctuating?
He leads BU’s Ecological Forecasting Laboratory and is the founder of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, a global consortium of ecologists tasked with predicting changes in nature, even as human activity profoundly influences natural systems.
Photo: A man in an olive green baseball cap and t-shirt speaking in the middle of a forest with his arms extended
Michael Dietze heads BU’s Ecological Forecasting Laboratory and says forecasts “represent our best scientific understanding of how systems work and how things are likely to change in the future.” Photo by Cydney Scott
“What we’re experiencing now isn’t a new normal. This is a continuous state of change,” Dietze says.
Ecological forecasting is the science of predicting future environmental scenarios—biodiversity, land and habitat use, ocean conditions, and more—with mathematical models, similar to weather predictions. Dietze’s research has focused on a wide variety of ecological processes, such as the storage of carbon in forests, croplands, and grasslands, the impacts of wildfires and hurricanes, the spread of invasive species, the location and variety of soil microbes to understand soil health, and the abundance of ticks and algal blooms. He also created tools that make ecosystem forecasting accessible to other scientists.
“Forecasts represent our best scientific understanding of how systems work and how things are likely to change in the future,” Dietze says. That’s because ecological forecasting doesn’t make predictions based only on past events. These forecasts rely on understanding the processes within an ecological system. In the case of predicting wildfires, for example, that means calculating how temperature, humidity, wind, and other factors affect vegetation flammability and fire spread and intensity, as well as the long-term impacts of the wildfires, like how much carbon is lost, which trees survive, and how vegetation can regenerate. With climate change causing once routine variations in fire seasons, storms, and droughts to stray from the norm, forecasting becomes more necessary for experts to make informed environmental-management decisions based on how a system is most likely to change.
“If a spruce forest burns down, will it go back to being a spruce forest? Will it become a shrubland or a grassland? Any of those might be possible, but if we want to manage that system for carbon storage, we might prefer some trajectories over others,” he says, since many factors influence how much carbon is absorbed by a forest, like tree species, the age of plants, and the abundance of insects and wildlife. “Forecasting can help inform those decisions.”
Putting forecasting into practice, Dietze and his team at BU recently landed a contract with the state of California to quantify carbon emission trajectories from farmlands. To build such a model, they’re using a combination of data assembled by NASA and other government agencies, remote sensors that monitor the environment, and computational models. “The goal is being able to apply all of that to make management decisions,” Dietze says. Experts could then, for example, understand where and how to mitigate emissions to avoid going above a certain threshold.
He hopes others follow California’s lead. Dietze recently coauthored a perspective paper in Nature Climate Change that argues for scaling up ecological forecasting efforts on a global level, so countries, states, and government agencies can rely on forecasts readily. He says researchers around the world are already building forecasts to understand a variety of ecosystem processes—from the patterns of flying foxes impacted by extreme heat in Australia, to monitoring fire-prone shrubland in South Africa, to predicting deforestation of the Amazon in Brazil. In a state of global climate flux, Dietze says, forecasting needs to be prioritized and relied upon to understand what the future might hold.
“Climate change isn’t something that’s happening in the future. It’s something that’s happening right now. And, given that it’s happening right now, our efforts in adaptation and mitigation have to start now,” he says. “We have to be the best stewards of the world as we can.”
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