Mark Friedl

Mark Friedl, affiliated faculty with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), is a physical geographer who focuses on interactions among the climate system, terrestrial ecosystems, and humans. Specifically, his research focuses on dynamics in land cover and land surface processes, both human-induced and natural, at local-to-global scales. He use remote sensing, field data, and modeling to characterize and understand how the Earth’s land use and land cover is changing, and to study bi-directional interactions between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere.

He is especially interested in observations and models that characterize and improve understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems are responding to climate change and human activities, and how these responses affect ecosystem processes and services. His current research foci include mapping land use, land cover, and land cover change at regional and global scales, monitoring and modeling dynamics in vegetation phenology and related ecosystem processes, and using remote sensing to characterize the properties, geography, and dynamics of global land use and human-dominated ecosystems.

He is a long-time member of multiple science teams including NASA’s MODIS Land Science Team, the Multi-Source Land Imaging Science Team, and the Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment team. He has been a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University, an Erasmus Mundus visiting scholar in Europe, and a visiting scientist at the Complex Systems Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. He served as Co-Chair for the Land Process Validation Working Group Sub-Committee on Land Cover Validation Committee on Earth Observation Satellites, as an associate editor and member of the editorial board for Remote Sensing of Environment, the Journal of Geophysical Research, Biogeosciences, and Ecological Applications.

Pronouns: he/him/his