Members > Steve Carpenter

Professor, University of Wisconsin

Dr. Steve Carpenter has been a member of the RA since its inception. He is currently Chair of the Board of Science. His research and expertise is on social-ecological systems that involve freshwater, aquatic ecosystem ecology, and scenarios, minimal modeling, and tools for envisioning change.

Steve Carpenter is a member in the RA's University of Wisconsin node, along with Buz Brock, Jon Foley, and Frances Westley.

He was Co-chair of the Scenarios Working Group, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), 2001-2005; and acknowledges that RA people and ideas were central to the MA scenarios

He is Chairman of the Board, Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, (also an RA member node); where he also participates in various resilience-related research activities.

He is a lead researcher on the Northern Highlands Lake District assessment, an ongoing project of the RA and MA.

Dr. Carpenter has had a sustained collaboration with Buz Brock and Don Ludwig on ecological economics and resilience, from about 1997 to present. Collaborations with Buz Brock, Jon Foley, Marten Scheffer and Monica Turner have been on aspects of identifying regime shifts, and leading indicators of regime shifts, in ecological and social-ecological systems. Collaboration with Frances Westley, Buz Brock, Carl Folke, Lance Gunderson and Marten Scheffer have focused on connections of novelty and transformation in social-ecological systems. A graduate student of Dr. Carpenter's, Oonsie Biggs, is developing her doctoral thesis around minimal models for social-ecological systems.

A new US EPA grant to Dr. Carpenter, "Eutrophication Thresholds -- Assessment, Mitigation and Resilience in Landscapes and Lakes" funds an investigation of the resilience of agriculture-water systems in Wisconsin, USA. The North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research site, a US-NSF program which Dr. Carpenter directs, is a key contributor and bridging organization for assessment in the Northern Highland Lake District.

Member Since: 2016