Miguel D. Mahecha
Professor for Earth System Data Science
Leipzig University
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ - Leipzig, Germany
I am a full professor at Leipzig University, specializing in the study of ecosystem responses to climate extremes and the human-environment nexus during these extreme events. My work also encompasses macroecological dynamics and ecosystem functioning, utilizing cutting-edge data science methods. A cornerstone of my research is the collaborative use of high-dimensional Earth observations, including the Earth System Data Cube concept that I have developed over the years.
My ultimate goal is to integrate empirical findings with theoretical and conceptual understanding in order to comprehend the complex interactions within the Earth system. I am a member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence. Additionally, I serve as co-spokesperson for the National Research Data Infrastructure for Earth System Sciences (NFDI4Earth).
Interests
- Effects of climate variability and extremes on ecosystems
- Earth system data cubes and data science
- Human environment nexus
- Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning
Education
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Full professor, 2020
Leipzig University
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Research group leader, 2012
Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
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PostDoc, 2010
Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
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PhD in Environmental Sciences, 2009
ETH Zurich
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Diploma in Geoecology, 2006
Bayreuth University
Latest
- Deadtrees.Earth - An Open-Access and Interactive Database for Centimeter-Scale Aerial Imagery to Uncover Global Tree Mortality Dynamics
- Dheed: An ERA5 Based Global Database of Dry and Hot Extreme Events from 1950 to 2022
- Explainable Earth Surface Forecasting under Extreme Events
- Comparing the Quantum Use Efficiency of Red and Far-Red Sun-Induced Fluorescence at Leaf and Canopy under Heat-Drought Stress
- Cautionary Remarks on the Planetary Boundary Visualisation
- Earth System Data Cubes: Avenues for Advancing Earth System Research
- Macrophenological Dynamics from Citizen Science Plant Occurrence Data
- Unpredicted Ecosystem Response to Compound Human Impacts in a European River
- Biodiversity and Climate Extremes: Known Interactions and Research Gaps
- DeepExtremeCubes: Integrating Earth System Spatio-Temporal Data for Impact Assessment of Climate Extremes
- On-Demand Earth System Data Cubes
- Lexcube: Interactive Visualization of Large Earth System Data Cubes
- Spatial Patterns of Vegetation Activity Related to ENSO in Northern South America
- Soil Heat Extremes Can Outpace Air Temperature Extremes
- Imputing Missing Data in Plant Traits: A Guide to Improve Gap-filling
- Leaf-Level Coordination Principles Propagate to the Ecosystem Scale
- Influence of Flooding underneath the Amazon Rainforest on Sentinel-1 Backscatter
- A Joint Framework for Studying Compound Ecoclimatic Events
- A Standardized Catalogue of Spectral Indices to Advance the Use of Remote Sensing in Earth System Research
- Global Variations in Critical Drought Thresholds That Impact Vegetation
- Biodiversity Loss and Climate Extremes — Study the Feedbacks
- Global Apparent Temperature Sensitivity of Terrestrial Carbon Turnover Modulated by Hydrometeorological Factors
- Interannual Global Carbon Cycle Variations Linked to Atmospheric Circulation Variability
- Challenging the Link between Functional and Spectral Diversity with Radiative Transfer Modeling and Data
- Citizen Science Plant Observations Encode Global Trait Patterns
- Spatially Autocorrelated Training and Validation Samples Inflate Performance Assessment of Convolutional Neural Networks
- SPECTRAL: AWESOME SPECTRAL INDICES DEPLOYED VIA THE GOOGLE EARTH ENGINE JAVASCRIPT API
- Physics-Aware Nonparametric Regression Models for Earth Data Analysis
- Decoupling between Ecosystem Photosynthesis and Transpiration: A Last Resort against Overheating
- Toward Causal Inference for Spatio-Temporal Data: Conflict and Forest Loss in Colombia
- EVALUATING THE POTENTIAL OF DESIS TO INFER PLANT TAXONOMICAL AND FUNCTIONAL DIVERSITIES IN EUROPEAN FORESTS
- Contrasting Biophysical and Societal Impacts of Hydro-Meteorological Extremes
- ISC-UNDRR-RISK KAN: Briefing Note on Systemic riskBriefing Note on Systemic Risk
- On the Potential of Sentinel-2 for Estimating Gross Primary Production
- Predicting Spatiotemporal Variability in Radial Tree Growth at the Continental Scale with Machine Learning
- ReservoirComputing.Jl: An Efficient and Modular Library for Reservoir Computing Models
- Climatic and Soil Factors Explain the Two-Dimensional Spectrum of Global Plant Trait Variation
- Time-Scale Dependent Relations Between Earth Observation Based Proxies of Vegetation Productivity
- The Three Major Axes of Terrestrial Ecosystem Function
- Performance of Singular Spectrum Analysis in Separating Seasonal and Fast Physiological Dynamics of Solar-Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence and PRI Optical Signals
- Crowd-Sourced Plant Occurrence Data Provide a Reliable Description of Macroecological Gradients
- Functional Convergence of Biosphere--Atmosphere Interactions in Response to Meteorological Conditions
- Where Are Global Vegetation Greening and Browning Trends Significant?
- A Unified Vegetation Index for Quantifying the Terrestrial Biosphere
- A Roadmap for High-Resolution Satellite Soil Moisture Applications -- Confronting Product Characteristics with User Requirements
- The Low Dimensionality of Development
- A Typology of Compound Weather and Climate Events
- Accounting for Multiple Testing in the Analysis of Spatio-Temporal Environmental Data
- Summarizing the State of the Terrestrial Biosphere in Few Dimensions
- Monitoring Plant Functional Diversity Using the Reflectance and Echo from Space
- Capturing the Influence of ENSO on Land Surface Variables for Tropical South America
- Learning Ordinary Differential Equations from Remote Sensing Data
- Vegetation Modulates the Impact of Climate Extremes on Gross Primary Production
- Earth System Data Cubes Unravel Global Multivariate Dynamics
- Estimating Causal Networks in Biosphere--Atmosphere Interaction with the PCMCI Approach
- Towards a Global Understanding of Vegetation--Climate Dynamics at Multiple Timescales
- Data Challenges Limit Our Global Understanding of Humanitarian Disasters Triggered by Climate Extremes
- Predicting Forest Cover in Distinct Ecosystems: The Potential of Multi-Source Sentinel-1 and -2 Data Fusion
- Inferring Plant Functional Diversity from Space: The Potential of Sentinel-2
- Extreme Anomaly Event Detection in Biosphere Using Linear Regression and a Spatiotemporal MRF Model
- Inferring Causation from Time Series in Earth System Sciences
- Predicting Landscapes from Environmental Conditions Using Generative Networks
- Time-Frequency Causal Inference Uncovers Anomalous Events in Environmental Systems
- Global Trait--Environment Relationships of Plant Communities
- Contrasting Biosphere Responses to Hydrometeorological Extremes: Revisiting the 2010 Western Russian Heatwave
- When Tree Rings Go Global: Challenges and Opportunities for Retro- and Prospective Insight
- Drought, Heat, and the Carbon Cycle: A Review
- Modelling Landsurface Time-Series with Recurrent Neural Nets
- Predicting Landscapes as Seen from Space from Environmental Conditions
- SMOS Vegetation Optical Depth and Ecosystem Functional Properties: Exploring Their Relationships in Tropical Forests
- Upscaled Diurnal Cycles of Land--Atmosphere Fluxes: A New Global Half-Hourly Data Product
- An Image Transform Based on Temporal Decomposition
- Impacts of Droughts and Extreme-Temperature Events on Gross Primary Production and Ecosystem Respiration: A Systematic Assessment across Ecosystems and Climate Zones
- Monitoring Ecological Change during Rapid Socio-Economic and Political Transitions: Colombian Ecosystems in the Post-Conflict Era
- Responses of Winter Wheat Yields to Warming-Mediated Vernalization Variations Across Temperate Europe
- Detecting Impacts of Extreme Events with Ecological in Situ Monitoring Networks
- Reverse Engineering Model Structures for Soil and Ecosystem Respiration: The Potential of Gene Expression Programming
- Ecosystem Functioning Is Enveloped by Hydrometeorological Variability
- Multivariate Anomaly Detection for Earth Observations: A Comparison of Algorithms and Feature Extraction Techniques
- Reviews and Syntheses: An Empirical Spatiotemporal Description of the Global Surface--Atmosphere Carbon Fluxes: Opportunities and Data Limitations
- Contrasting and Interacting Changes in Simulated Spring and Summer Carbon Cycle Extremes in European Ecosystems
- Plants, Microorganisms, and Soil Temperatures Contribute to a Decrease in Methane Fluxes on a Drained Arctic Floodplain
- The ESA's Earth Observation Open Science Program [Space Agencies]
- Refining Multi-Model Projections of Temperature Extremes by Evaluation against Land--Atmosphere Coupling Diagnostics
- Have Precipitation Extremes and Annual Totals Been Increasing in the World's Dry Regions over the Last 60 Years?
- Improved Tree-Ring Archives Will Support Earth-System Science
- Stand Age and Species Richness Dampen Interannual Variation of Ecosystem-Level Photosynthetic Capacity
- A Second Horizon Scan of Biogeography: Golden Ages, Midas Touches, and the Red Queen
- Diagnosing the Dynamics of Observed and Simulated Ecosystem Gross Primary Productivity with Time Causal Information Theory Quantifiers
- Potential and Limitations of Inferring Ecosystem Photosynthetic Capacity from Leaf Functional Traits
- A Novel Bias Correction Methodology for Climate Impact Simulations
- The Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function
- Ecosystem Responses to Climate Extremes
- Quantifying Changes in Climate Variability and Extremes: Pitfalls and Their Overcoming
- Effect of Spatial Sampling from European Flux Towers for Estimating Carbon and Water Fluxes with Artificial Neural Networks
- Effects of Climate Extremes on the Terrestrial Carbon Cycle: Concepts, Processes and Potential Future Impacts
- Ranking Drivers of Global Carbon and Energy Fluxes over Land
- Coincidences of Climate Extremes and Anomalous Vegetation Responses: Comparing Tree Ring Patterns to Simulated Productivity
- Influence of Physiological Phenology on the Seasonal Pattern of Ecosystem Respiration in Deciduous Forests
- Carbon Cycle Extremes during the 21st Century in CMIP5 Models: Future Evolution and Attribution to Climatic Drivers
- Linking Plant and Ecosystem Functional Biogeography
- Harmonized European Long-Term Climate Data for Assessing the Effect of Changing Temporal Variability on Land--Atmosphere CO textsubscript2 Fluxes
- Climate-Mediated Spatiotemporal Variability in Terrestrial Productivity across Europe
- Extreme Events in Gross Primary Production: A Characterization across Continents
- Impact of Large-scale Climate Extremes on Biospheric Carbon Fluxes: An Intercomparison Based on MsTMIP Data
- A Few Extreme Events Dominate Global Interannual Variability in Gross Primary Production
- An Extended Approach for Spatiotemporal Gapfilling: Dealing with Large and Systematic Gaps in Geoscientific Datasets
- Climate Extremes and the Carbon Cycle
- Detection and Attribution of Large Spatiotemporal Extreme Events in Earth Observation Data
- Trend Change Detection in NDVI Time Series: Effects of Inter-Annual Variability and Methodology
- State-Dependent Errors in a Land Surface Model across Biomes Inferred from Eddy Covariance Observations on Multiple Timescales
- A Framework for Benchmarking Land Models
- Analyzing Floristic Inventories with Multiple Maps
- Climate Classifications: The Value of Unsupervised Clustering
- TRY -- a Global Database of Plant Traits
- Response to Comment on ``Global Convergence in the Temperature Sensitivity of Respiration at Ecosystem Level''
- Long-Term Structures in Southern German Runoff Data
- Semiempirical Modeling of Abiotic and Biotic Factors Controlling Ecosystem Respiration across Eddy Covariance Sites: SEMIEMPIRICAL MODELING OF ECOSYSTEM RESPIRATION
- Deciphering the Components of Regional Net Ecosystem Fluxes Following a Bottom-up Approach for the Iberian Peninsula
- Identification of Vegetation and Soil Carbon Pools out of Equilibrium in a Process Model via Eddy Covariance and Biometric Constraints
- Identifying Multiple Spatiotemporal Patterns: A Refined View on Terrestrial Photosynthetic Activity
- Global Convergence in the Temperature Sensitivity of Respiration at Ecosystem Level
- Comparing Observations and Process-based Simulations of Biosphere-atmosphere Exchanges on Multiple Timescales
- Biosphere-Atmosphere Exchange of CO_2 in Relation to Climate: A Cross-Biome Analysis across Multiple Time Scales
- Identification of Characteristic Plant Co-Occurrences in Neotropical Secondary Montane Forests
- Revealing Biogeographical Patterns by Nonlinear Ordinations and Derived Anisotropic Spatial Filters
- Statistical Properties of Random CO2 Flux Measurement Uncertainty Inferred from Model Residuals
- Characterizing Ecosystem-Atmosphere Interactions from Short to Interannual Time Scales
- Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction: Alternative Ordination Approaches for Extracting and Visualizing Biodiversity Patterns in Tropical Montane Forest Vegetation Data