Brooke Osborne, Ph.D.

Field: Environment and Society
Areas of Focus: Climate Change, Ecosystems Ecology, Environmental Science, Soil Science

Expertise

• ecology
• ecosystem ecology
• biogeochemistry
• global change
• dryland ecology
• tropical ecology
• desert ecology
• soil science

Bio

Brooke Osborne is an ecosystem ecologist with broad skills in biogeochemistry, soil science, and microbial ecology. She seeks to advance quantitative understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems respond to and shape our changing world. Osborne is motivated by the urgent need for improved forecasts of ecosystem responses to disturbance and global change and for innovative solutions to some of our most pressing environmental challenges. For these reasons, her research emphasizes dryland and tropical forest ecosystems, which provide crucial services, play dominant roles in global biogeochemical cycling, and are predicted to be exceptionally sensitive to disturbance and global change. Yet, they represent large unknowns in our predictions of future carbon cycling and climate across regional and global scales.

Osborne has an MS from Colorado State and a Ph.D. from Brown University in Ecology. She was a postdoctoral fellow with the US Geological Survey and remains an associate there. She actively collaborates with federal and Tribal scientists and land managers across the western U.S.