Sandra Lavorel

Sandra Lavorel is a functional ecologist whose career has focused on the interlinkages between human-driven changes in land and climate, and ecosystems, considered through their biodiversity, their functioning and their contributions to humans. For 20 years, her research has aimed to embed the understanding of ecological processes into the quantification of ecosystem services, the contributions of nature to human quality of life, and how these can support decision for adapting to a changing world.
She has led interdisciplinary projects and international networks, weaving knowledge and methods from ecology, geography, agronomy, sociology and anthropology among others, to address nature-based processes of transformation. This highly transdisciplinary work has involved long-term place-based knowledge co-production with diverse stakeholders and decision-makers from multiple sectors (agriculture, forestry, nature protection, tourism, land planning…).
She has also had a continuing priority in building from such place-based evidence to generic concepts, data syntheses and scaling for large-scale transformation. In this endeavour, she has had a long-standing commitment to contributing and steering excellent science for environmental policy through participation in strategic and decision processes of regional (e.g. protected areas), national (e.g. science advisory committee to the President of France, Ministries for Higher Education and Research and for Environment) and international institutions (e.g. IPBES).