Kelly Chauvin

Kelly Chauvin is a lecturer and researcher focused on stewardship interventions for biodiversity protection and landscape management in the Anthropocene.   She is currently leading the Tule Elk Reintroduction Study, a collaborative project to evaluate the potential ecological benefits (and drawbacks) of translocation of tule elk to the open spaces of the San Francisco Bay Peninsula.

Her teaching interests include understanding and developing conservation decision-making tools, understanding the cultural frameworks of landscape decision-making, and sharing the joy of place-based learning and building a personal relationship with nature.  Her research interests include conservation governance (particularly identifying new paradigms for conservation landscape decision-making), bio-centric models of landscape conservation, and creating conservation decision making tools that allow for the integration of diverse datasets, knowledge bases, and stakeholders.  

She received her PhD in 2016 from Stanford University, where her doctoral research focused on uncovering the strategies tropical canopy trees use to defend themselves against foliar herbivory, and identifying emergent patterns of this functional diversity across large landscapes in Panama and Peru, in remotely-sensed spectral signatures, and across phylogenies.  Before joining the Hadly lab as a staff member, she was a postdoc at Jasper Ridge working with the Santa Cruz Mountains Stewardship Network to develop an online atlas of landscape health for conservation managers.