Stacy Lynn - Homepage

Dr. Lynn is a social ecologist whose work focuses on complex sustainability challenges for rangeland landscapes and livelihoods in Africa and the US West. These issues are becoming increasingly critical as more variable and extreme conditions such as drought and flood impact both food production and ecosystems—especially at the confluence of people, policy, and resources. Her core approaches to research include interdisciplinary and participatory practices, needs-driven inquiry, and situation assessment & stakeholder analysis. She uses a broad set of quantitative and qualitative ecological and social science methods to investigate complex, applied, social-ecological questions in the service of both people and ecosystems.

Dr. Lynn’s community-level partnerships have led to more than two decades of work with East African pastoralist communities in the context of land use change and land use policy, human-wildlife interactions, livestock management, problematic plants, education and development, traditional ecological knowledge, and climate observations. In the US West she investigates contributions of livestock grazing to ecosystems, livestock producers, and other stakeholders. She is leading the development of a K-12 curriculum on Western free-roaming horse ecology and management to be launched nationwide in 2026. Dr. Lynn believes it is important to connect society to science, and to democratize science practice through deep engagement, participation, and education. As such she serves as the Director of Research and Education for CitSci.org, a platform supporting participatory science that was developed at NREL.

In addition to her research, Dr. Lynn teaches undergraduate and graduate sustainability courses for the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability (ESS). She has led the SUPER undergraduate research program since 2016, scaffolding students’ foundational research preparedness and facilitating research with paired mentors while providing guided mentorship experience to faculty and graduate students.