Dr. Elena Bennett is an Associate Professor at McGill. She received her BA in Biology and Environmental Studies from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1994, earned her MSc in Land Resources in 1999 (U. Wisconsin) and her PhD in Limnology and Marine Sciences in 2002 (U. Wisconsin). She is co-chair of the international project ecoSERVICES, which aims to set the research agenda for ecosystem services for the coming decade, and lead author on the IPBES Global Assessment. Dr. Bennett was a Leopold Leadership Fellow (2012), and a Trottier Public Policy Professor (2013-2014). At McGill, she has won awards for undergraduate teaching, graduate supervision, and contributions to campus sustainability. In 2012, she was selected to be one of two representatives of the Royal Society of Canada at the Summer Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum held in Tianjin, China. In 2016, she was named one of six NSERC Steacie Fellows.

Research in the Bennett lab centers around questions about ecosystem services, the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. Humanity has always depended on the services provided by ecosystems, including products such as food, freshwater, and fiber, (provisioning ecosystem services, ES), non-material benefits such as places for recreation and inspiration (cultural ES) and benefits obtained by regulation of ecosystem processes, such as flood control and climate regulation (regulating ES). A growing body of evidence indicates that most ecosystem management, which attempts to maximize one ecosystem service (ES) at a time, actually makes ecosystems vulnerable to substantial declines in other services or to increased likelihood of nonlinear, surprising changes in the provision of services. For this reason, recent studies have called for increased attention to managing multiple ES together. However, effective management of multiple ES is impeded by inadequate understanding of the interactions among ES and the slowly changing variables that appear to regulate these interactions. We are interested in how the types of ecosystem services interact across the landscape over long time periods and how we can manage landscapes to provide multiple ecosystem services. Under this large umbrella, our work is divided into several research themes listed below.