Welcome to the Global Change Research Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We are a group of scientists who are interested in understanding how climate change and human activities affect terrestrial ecosystems as well as their feedback to the human and Earth systems. We develop and use a variety of tools including land surface models, remote sensing models and data, integrated assessment models and model-data fusion techniques.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
George Box
Lab news
UniTree: Mapping Individual Trees Without Starting from Scratch
Mapping individual tree crowns from aerial imagery helps us understand forest structure and monitor ecosystem health. But a major bottleneck remains: AI models often need new, manually labeled examples when moving to a different landscape …
September 17, 2026
New Publication: Fujiang Ji Develops Deep Learning Framework for High-Resolution Hyperspectral Reconstruction
We are excited to share that Fujiang Ji has published a new paper, “Robust hyperspectral reconstruction from satellite and airborne observations via a deep hierarchical fusion network across heterogeneous scenarios,” in Remote Sensing of Environment. …
April 12, 2026
AGU 2025!
December 26, 2025
New Study Led by Fujiang Ji Demonstrates How Satellite Hyperspectral Imaging Can Track Seasonal Plant Trait Dynamics Across U.S. Forests
A new paper led by Fujiang Ji demonstrates that satellite hyperspectral data can reliably track seasonal changes in plant physiology across U.S. forests. Using a framework that links PRISMA satellite imagery with NEON airborne hyperspectral …
November 21, 2025
Congratulations to Dr. Fujiang Ji on His Successful PhD Defense
We are thrilled to celebrate Fujiang Ji on the successful defense of his PhD dissertation. Fujiang’s dissertation, Understanding the Dynamics of Plant Functional Traits Across Spatial, Temporal, and Biological Scales Using Multi-Source Hyperspectral Remote Sensing …
November 4, 2025
New Publication: Advancing Understanding of Using SIF to Track Forest Carbon
We are excited to announce the publication of a new paper from our lab in Remote Sensing of Environment, led by Haoran Liu. The team developed TECs-SIF, a new computer model that can simulate both …
October 2, 2025New Publication: Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Improves Photosynthesis Modeling
We are excited to announce that our lab’s latest research, led by Haoran Liu with contributions from Fa Li, Hamid Dashti, and Min Chen, has been published in Remote Sensing of Environment:“Hyperspectral surface reflectance improves …
August 28, 2025
Congratulations to Dr. Meng Luo on Her Successful PhD Defense
We are so pleased to celebrate Meng Luo on the successful defense of her PhD dissertation. Meng’s dissertation, Quantifying the Impacts of Forest Carbon Change on Future Land Use and Land Cover Change Projections, makes …
August 13, 2025
New Publication: Terrestrial Carbon Cycle Uncertainty Challenging Energy Transition Predictability
We are thrilled to announce the release of our latest open-access publication: We are excited to share that our latest open-access paper, “Uncertain Global Terrestrial Carbon Cycles Complicate the Predictability of Global Energy Transition Pathways”, …
August 13, 2025New Publication: TECs (v1) — Bridging Carbon Flux Modeling and Hyperspectral Observations
Congratulations to Haoran Liu, PhD student in our lab, on his new publication in Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems! The paper, “TECs (v1): A Terrestrial Ecosystem Carbon Cycle Simulator Integrated with Spectral Reflection …
July 4, 2025- More