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National Academy of Sciences Honors STAR Grantees
The National Academy of Sciences recently elected Dr. Gretchen C. Daily, a Science to Achieve Results (STAR) grantee, as a member of its prestigious organization. Dr. Daily is part of a group of 90 new members.
Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer. Members and foreign associates of the Academy are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The Academy membership is comprised of approximately 2,000 members and 350 foreign associates, of whom more than 200 have won Nobel Prizes.
Dr. Daily is Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Director of the Tropical Research Program of the Center for Conservation Biology, and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. She was elected to the NAS for integrating "ecological and economic knowledge of ecosystems to revolutionize the scientific understanding of the connections between human well-being and ecosystems." As a STAR grantee, she participated in a research team examining the potential for practical applications of recent scientific and economic research on the valuation and protection of ecosystem services (http://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract/3/report/0). In brief, they found that legal authority currently on the books authorizes greater protection of services in the context of wetlands mitigation banking, environmental impact assessment, CERCLA site remediation, and oil spill remediation. In addition, agencies generally do not explicitly consider protection of ecosystem services in their activities but, in some cases, protect the services indirectly.
Dr. Daily's primary scientific efforts concern the future course of extinction, the resulting changes in the delivery of ecosystem services, and novel opportunities for biodiversity conservation. She is developing "Countryside Biogeography," a framework for forecasting changes in biodiversity supported by field research, remote sensing, and theoretical modeling. Dr. Daily is also investigating ecosystem services, assessing their dependence on biodiversity, their susceptibility to human impacts, and priorities for their conservation. Finally, Dr. Daily is developing an interdisciplinary framework in conservation finance for assessing the scope and efficacy of diverse institutional mechanisms that aim to align economic incentives with conservation.
Dr. Daily has published over 125 scientific and popular articles.