Karen Seto

Karen Seto is an urban and land change scientist and the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The overarching objective of her research is to understand how urbanization will affect the planet. Using a combination of satellite Earth Observation/Remote Sensing, socioeconomic and biophysical data, field research, and modeling methods, her work focuses on four themes: 1) characterizing urban land-use; 2) understanding the drivers of urban land-use change; 3) forecasting urban expansion; and 4) assessing the large-scale environmental consequences of urban expansion. She co-founded and co-chaired the IHDP international scientific project Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) from 2006 to 2016, and was Coordinating Lead Author for the urban mitigation chapter of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report. She is co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Global Environmental Change. She was named an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in 2009 and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2017.