Ashley Larsen

Bio

Ashley is an Assistant Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, UC Santa Barbara. She completed a PhD in Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology (2015) with a concurrent MA in Economics (2012) at UC Santa Barbara, and was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Science, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley. The broad goal of her research program is to understand how to balance food production with the preservation of intact ecosystems and the important functions intact ecosystems generate. Within this overarching umbrella, she focuses on how the matrix of anthropogenic and natural land uses affects ecosystem services and disservices, often related to agricultural pests and pesticides, and how land use interacts with global environmental change to drive biodiversity and ecological function in human-dominated landscapes. More generally, she uses a combination of causal inference and geospatial approaches to test and advance ecological concepts and often teams up with other natural and social scientists to generate more holistic understanding of social-ecological systems. She has published in leading science journals including PNAS, Nature Sustainability, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Global Change Biology and is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award.