Dr. Diane Wickland

Diane Wickland works at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, where she oversees the planning and implementation of NASA's Terrestrial Ecology research program and leads its Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area. The work involves planning future research directions, drafting program plans, arranging for peer review of proposals and research projects, recommending and managing funded research, and reporting on performance and accomplishments. As a Focus Area lead, she coordinates research programs in land cover and land use change, ocean biogeochemistry, terrestrial ecology, and biodiversity. In these roles she regularly seeks inputs from the ecological and remote sensing communities and builds partnerships with national and international research and space programs.

Diane has organized numerous field campaigns and airborne deployments that have been conducted at locations around the world (e.g., Brazil, Africa, Europe, Canada). The current major field campaign, now in its synthesis and integration phase, is the Large-Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) to study the effects of tropical forest conversion, regrowth, and selective logging on carbon storage, nutrient dynamics, trace gas fluxes and the prospect for sustainable land use in the Amazon region.

She is responsible for the scientific outcomes of NASA Earth observing missions and their data systems, serving as Program Scientist for the NPOESS Preparatory Mission (NPP), for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) currently, and until July 2004 for Terra and MODIS. She was also the Program Scientist for the New Millennium Program (NMP) EO-1 mission through its successful launch in 2000.

Diane is a member of the Carbon Cycle Interagency Working Group (CCIWG) and Ecosystems Interagency Working Group (EIWG) under the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). She chairs two subcommittees of the CCIWG, the Agency Executive Committee that is facilitating the production of CCSP Synthesis and Assessment Product 2.2 (also known as the State of the Carbon Cycle Report) and the North American Carbon Program (NACP) Office Subcommittee.

She received a B.A. degree from the University of Wisconsin - Madison (Botany) and M.S. (Botany) and Ph.D. (Biology/Botany) degrees from the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. She has conducted ecological research at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in Aiken, SC, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. Research interests have included plant ecology, biogeochemistry, vegetation science, stress and disturbance effects, remote sensing, and global ecosystem dynamics.

Diane Wickland is certified under the Ecological Society of America's (ESA) Professional Certification Program as a Senior Ecologist. She is the 2007 recipient of the American Geophysical Union's Edward A. Flinn III Award.