Bio

Claire Kremen is UBC’s President’s Excellence Chair in Biodiversity with a joint appointment in IRES and Zoology at University of British Columbia. She is an ecologist and applied conservation biologist working on how to reconcile agricultural land use with biodiversity conservation. 

Current research questions in her lab address the important role of agricultural diversification for biodiversity and sustainability specifically by addressing how diversification can promote population connectivity, resource use, and persistence for wildlife species, and, by tracing the effects of diversification through ecological pathways all the way to socio-economic outcomes and consider how to surmount the numerous barriers to their adoption.

Before coming to UBC, she held faculty appointments first at Princeton University and then at University of California, Berkeley, where she was also founding Faculty Director for the Center for Diversified Farming Systems and the Berkeley Food Institute. Prior to those appointments, she worked for over a decade for the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Xerces Society, designing protected area networks and conducting biodiversity research in Madagascar, a biodiversity hotspot. Her work both then and now strives to develop practical conservation solutions while adding fundamentally to biodiversity science. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Conservation International, Field Chief Editor for Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, and, since 2014, has been noted as a highly-cited researcher (Thomson-Reuters’ “World’s Most Influential Minds”/Clarivate Analytics).   

Projects

How can we enhance working lands for more wild species?

In order to understand how agricultural working lands can support wild species, we must first understand how wild species use, live or move across working landscapes. For example, what components of the landscape are animals using for food, nesting, or mating purposes? Or how do animals such as elephants, birds, frogs or bumblebees navigate across farmlands?  Do diversification practices provide more resources or help animals to move?  Answering these questions at both local scales and within a global context can enable us to better design our agricultural landscapes to support positive biodiversity outcomes.

How can we manage working lands more sustainably?

Kremen’s lab studies how agricultural diversification, and its converse, landscape simplification and chemical intensification, affect ecological communities of wild pollinators, pests and predators, and how these community characteristics in turn affect the ecosystem services of crop pollination and crop pest control. They assess how these services affect crop yields and profits, and seek to understand what social and economic factors affect farmer’s interest and ability to adopt diversification practices. Combining these elements, they aim to inform and improve upon the condition of agricultural working landscapes to protect the wild species also found there and support sustainable food production.

Courses

RES 509 Advanced Conservation Science

RES 510 Social Ecological Systems

Featured Publications

Shepon A, T Wu, C Kremen, T Dayan, I Perfecto, J Fanzo, G Eshel, C D Golden, 2023, Exploring scenarios for the food system–zoonotic risk interface, The Lancet Planetary Health, 7:4, e329-e335, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(23)00007-4

Blesh, J., Mehrabi, Z., Wittman, H., Kerr, R. B., James, D., Madsen, S., Smith, O. M., Snapp, S., Stratton, A. E., Bakarr, M., Bicksler, A. J., Galt, R., Garibaldi, L. A., Gemmill-herren, B., Grass, I., Isaac, M. E., John, I., Jones, S. K., Kennedy, C. M., Kremen, C. (2023). Against the odds : Network and institutional pathways enabling agricultural diversification. One Earth, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2023.03.004

Kremen C. and I. Geladi, 2023, Land-Sparing and Sharing: Identifying Areas of Consensus, Remaining Debate and Alternatives, Reference Module in Life Sciences, Elsevier, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-822562-2.00072-4.

Garcia K., E M. Olimpi, L M’Gonigle, D S. Karp, E E. Wilson-Rankin, C Kremen, D J. Gonthier, 2023, Semi-natural habitats on organic strawberry farms and in surrounding landscapes promote bird biodiversity and pest control potential, Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 347:108353, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2023.108353.

Sargent, R. D., J. Carrillo, C. Kremen, Common pesticides disrupt critical ecological interactions, 2023, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 38(3), 207-210, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.12.002.

DeClerck, F.A.J., I Koziell, T Benton, L A. Garibaldi, C Kremen, M Maron, C Rumbaitis Del Rio, A Sidhu, J Wirths, M Clark, C Dickens, N Estrada Carmona, A K. Fremier, S K. Jones, C K. Khoury, R Lal, M Obersteiner, Roseline Remans, Adrien Rusch, Lisa A. Schulte, J Simmonds, L C. Stringer, C Weber & L Winowiecki (2023). A Whole Earth Approach to Nature-Positive Food: Biodiversity and Agriculture. In: von Braun, J., Afsana, K., Fresco, L.O., Hassan, M.H.A. (eds) Science and Innovations for Food Systems Transformation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15703-5_25

Carlisle L., K. Esquivel, P. Baur, N. F. Ichikawa, E. M. Olimpie, J. Ory, H. Waterhouse, A. Iles, D. S. Karp, C. Kremen, and T. M. Bowles (2022). Organic farmers face persistent barriers to adopting diversification practices in California’s Central Coast. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 1-28. PDF

Karandikar, H., M. W. Serota, W. C. Sherman, J. R. Green, G. Verta, C. Kremen, A D. Middleton. (2022). Dietary patterns of a versatile large carnivore, the puma (Puma concolor). Evolution and Ecology. 1-11. 12:e9002. PDF

Sciligo, A. R., M’Gonigle, L. K., Kremen, C. (2022). Local diversification enhances pollinator visitation to strawberry and may improve pollination and marketability. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 01–11. PDF 

Beckett, K., Elle, E., Kremen, C., Sherwood, A., McComb, S. & Martin, T.G. 2022. Hyperabundant black-tailed deer impact endangered Garry oak ecosystem floral and bumblebee communities. Global Ecology and Conservation: e02237. PDF

 Liebert, J., Benner, R., Bezner Kerr, R. et al. Farm size affects the use of agroecological practices on organic farms in the United States. Nat. Plants (2022). PDF

Ward, L. T., Hladik, M. L., Guzman, A., Winsemius, S., Bautista, A., Kremen, C., & Mills, N. J. (2022). Pesticide exposure of wild bees and honey bees foraging from field border flowers in intensively managed agriculture areas. Science of The Total Environment, 831, 154697. PDF

Brennan, A., Naidoo, R., Greenstreet, L., Mehrabi, Z., Ramankutty, N., & Kremen, C. (2022). Functional connectivity of the world’s protected areas. Science, 376(6597), 1101-1104. PDF. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science on vol. 376, 3 June 2022, DOI: 10.1126/science.abl8974

Olimpi, E. M., Garcia, K., Gonthier, D. J., Kremen, C., Snyder, W. E., Wilson‐Rankin, E. E., & Karp, D. S. (2022). Semi‐natural habitat surrounding farms promotes multifunctionality in avian ecosystem services. Journal of Applied Ecology, 59(4), 898-908. PDF

Chapman, M., Wiltshire, S., Baur, P., Bowles, T.,  Carlisle, L., Castillo, F., Esquivel, K., Gennet, S., Iles, A., Karp, D., Kremen, C., Liebert, J., Olimpi, E. M., Ory, J., Ryan, M., Sciligo, A., Thompson, J., Waterhouse, H., Boettiger, C. (2022). Social-ecological feedbacks drive tipping points in farming system diversification. One Earth, 5(3), 283-292. PDF

Allen-Perkins, Alfonso, Magrach, Ainhoa, Dainese, Matteo, Garibaldi, Lucas A., Kleijn, David, Rader, Romina, Reilly, James R., et al. 2022. “ CropPol: A Dynamic, Open and Global Database on Crop Pollination.” Ecology 103( 3): e3614. PDF

Olimpi, E. M., Daly, H., Garcia, K., Glynn, V. M., Gonthier, D. J., Kremen, C., M’Gonigle, L. K., & Karp, D. S. (2022). Interactive effects of multiscale diversification practices on farmland bird stress. Conservation Biology, 00, e13902. PDF

Lu, A., Gonthier, D. J., Sciligo, A. R., Garcia, K., Chiba, T., Juárez, G., & Kremen, C. (2022). Changes in arthropod communities mediate the effects of landscape composition and farm management on pest control ecosystem services in organically managed strawberry crops. Journal of Applied Ecology, 59, 585– 597. PDF

Khelifa, R., Mellal, M. K., Mahdjoub, H., Hasanah, N., & Kremen, C. (2022). Biodiversity Exploitation for Online Entertainment. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2. PDF

Wu JS-T, Hauert C, Kremen C and Zhao J (2022) A Framework on Polarization, Cognitive Inflexibility, and Rigid Cognitive Specialization. Front. Psychol. 13:776891. PDF