Laura Lopez Hoffman

Laura López-Hoffman is Professor at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, and an Assistant Research Professor at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She obtained her PhD from Stanford University in Biological Sciences and her BA from Princeton University. Prior to coming to the University of Arizona, she was an NSF post-doctoral fellow at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

López-Hoffman started her career as a tropical ecologist.  As an undergrad, she worked on the Amazon frontier on sustainable timber harvesting and then switched to mangroves in graduate school.  After years of slogging through mangrove swamps in the South Pacific and South America, she got out of the mud, came back to dry land, and focused on environmental policy.

Today, the objective of her research is to contribute to the development of environmental policies and institutions that protect ecosystems while sustaining their contributions to human well-being. She uses interdisciplinary and comparative research approaches to integrate science and policy, in particular the concept of ecosystem services.

Research Interests:  Today, the objective of her research is to contribute to the development of environmental policies and institutions that protect ecosystems while sustaining their contributions to human well-being. She uses interdisciplinary and comparative research approaches to integrate science and policy, in particular the concept of ecosystem services.

Much of López-Hoffman’s work focuses how the ecosystem services approach can improve natural resource governance. For example, she and her students are investigating how ecosystem services are evaluated in environmental assessments under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In addition, she and Dave Breshears are working on strategies to increase stakeholder resilience when faced with loss of ecosystem services due to abrupt climate change.

López-Hoffman is also very interested in the ecology and policy of managing transboundary systems. With colleagues at the USGS and UNAM, she has been studying how migratory species facilitate the sharing of ecosystem services between the United States and Mexico, and approaches to protecting migratory species. In addition, with colleagues across North America, she is investigating strategies to make transboundary conservation efforts more adaptive to climate change.

• Conservation biology and policy
• tranboundary conservation
• ecosystem services