Karen Holl

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. Her current research focuses in rain forests in Latin America and chaparral, grassland and riparian systems in California. She advises numerous public and private agencies on land management and restoration; recently she has been working to improve outcomes of the effort of the many large-scale tree growing campaigns. In 2008 she was selected as an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow and is committed to communicating with policy makers and the public. She teaches courses in restoration ecology, conservation biology, and environmental problem solving. She served as chair of the Environmental Studies Department and as the faculty director for the Ken Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz. She is a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and the Ecological Society of America, and was the 2017 winner of the Theodore Sperry Award of the Society for Ecological Restoration. Her Primer of Ecological Restoration ​was published by Island Press in 2020.