Paul Hanson

Position title: Research Professor, Center for Limnology

Research Summary

I am a Research Professor and ecosystems ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Limnology. My work examines how climate change, land use, and human activities shape the dynamics and resilience of lakes and freshwater ecosystems. I lead interdisciplinary teams that bring together ecology, computer science, and engineering to advance both ecological understanding and environmental data science. I direct the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI), a national effort to make environmental data accessible, reusable, and impactful. I also co-founded the GLEON Fellows Program, which trains graduate students in collaborative science and data-intensive approaches to studying lakes. Much of my recent work centers on Ecology–Knowledge Guided Machine Learning (Eco-KGML), an approach that fuses ecological theory with modern machine learning. Through Eco-KGML, my collaborators and I develop improved predictions of lake water quality, while also applying AI to enhance metadata annotation and semantic structure within EDI.

Website