Dr. Karen Holl PhD

Karen Holl is a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on understanding how local and landscape scale processes affect ecosystem recovery from human disturbance and using this information to restore damaged ecosystems. She studies restoration of rain forests in Latin America and chaparral, grassland and riparian systems in California. She oversees a long-term tropical forest restoration study in southern Costa Rica and has worked with students and collaborators in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Panama. She advises numerous land management and conservation organizations in California and internationally on ecological restoration projects. She was the 2017 co-winner of the Theodore Sperry Award of the Society for Ecological Restoration and was elected as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and the Ecological Society of America. She teaches courses in restoration ecology, conservation biology, and environmental problem solving.