Jiafu Mao

Senior Staff Scientist

I study the response and feedback of land surface to environmental change. My work primarily involves understanding and modeling of carbon, hydrology and vegetation dynamics in the Earth terrestrial ecosystem using field measurements, satellite data, process-oriented land surface and Earth system models, and various statistic methods including the machine learning techniques; investigating the land surface response to multiple-factor global change and attributing the variations of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics to natural and anthropogenic drivers; and global scale coupling research primarily concentrating on human-land-climate interactions using the integrated Earth system modeling and statistical framework. My research has been published in leading journals including Nature Climate Change, Nature Geoscience, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and Global Change Biology among others. I have also been involved in mentoring students and researchers at ORNL and from different universities.