Laurel Larsen, PhD, is an associate professor of earth systems science in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
Larsen’s work focuses primarily on how flowing water structures the form and function of landscapes, with emphases on the Florida Everglades, wet meadows across the US, and intermittent streams in coastal California. Larsen’s Environmental Systems Dynamics Laboratory takes a complex-systems approach to environmental problems, seeking to understand the set of interactions and feedbacks that produce emergent phenomena. The lab’s approach to problems integrates field work and numerical modeling to identify the most critical drivers of landscape-scale change and generate predictions about how landscapes will respond to climate change or changes in management.
Her work has influenced restoration efforts in the Everglades, with ongoing work focusing on the Chesapeake Bay, streams and wet meadows of California, and the Wax Lake Delta, part of the greater Mississippi River delta complex. She remains committed to using a variety of tools, from field and laboratory work, to simulation modeling, to data-driven analysis, to understand environmental processes. As a Hertz Fellow, Laurel earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and also trained at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
