Gretchen Daily

Gretchen C. Daily (born October 19, 1964) is an American environmental scientist and tropical ecologist.

She has contributed to understanding humanity's dependence and impacts on nature, and to advancing a systematic approach for valuing nature in policy, finance, management, and practice around the world.

Daily is co-founder and faculty director of the Natural Capital Project, a global partnership that aims to mainstream the values of nature into decision-making of people, governments, investors, corporations, NGOs, and other institutions.

Together with more than 300 partners worldwide, the Project is pioneering science, technology, and scalable demonstrations of inclusive, sustainable development.

Based at Stanford University, Daily is the Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Daily is an elected fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Daily is a former board member of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of The Nature Conservancy.

Born in Washington, D.C., Daily was raised mostly in California and West Germany, where she graduated from high school in 1982.

She then returned to California and earned her B.S. (1986), M.S (1987), and Ph.D. (1992) in biological sciences from Stanford University.

In 1992, Daily was awarded the Winslow/Heinz Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group.

In 1995 Daily became the Bing Interdisciplinary Research Scientist in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University.

During her time as a research scientist, Daily served as the editor of Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems, a foundational book that lays out the framework used widely today for understanding the benefits of nature to people, with numerous examples and ways of considering their value.

The Heinz Foundation noted that Nature's Services "has served as a model for ecosystems regulation in several regions of the world and was a catalyst for the U.N.'s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment."

In this book, together with Anne Howland Ehrlich and Paul R. Ehrlich, published in 1995 by Yale University Press, the authors look at the interaction between population and food supply and offer a strategy for balancing human numbers with nutritional needs.

Their proposals include improving the status of women by giving them equal education, reducing racism and religious prejudice, reforming the agricultural system, and shrinking the growing gap between rich and poor.

"This generation faces a set of challenges unprecedented in their scope and severity and in the shortness of time left to resolve them. . . . The Stork and the Plow sets these out thoughtfully [and] accurately. . . . We can all hope this urgent message is carefully heeded."

Nature's Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems was published in 1997 by Island Press.

Nature's Services starts off with an introduction from Daily titled "What are Ecosystem Services" and another introductory piece by Harold Mooney and Paul Ehrlich that seeks to detail the "fragmentary history" of ecosystem services.

After the introductions, the book is split into four distinct sections that address different elements of ecosystem services.

After 7 years as a research scientist, Daily was appointed as an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and as a senior fellow at the Institute of International Studies (both at Stanford University) in 2002.

In 2002, Daily published the book The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable with Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Katherine Ellison.

In 2005, Daily was appointed as the Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and was made the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.

In 2005, Daily (the project leader from Stanford), along with partners at The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund, established the Natural Capital Project.

The organization's stated goal is to "improve the well-being of people and our planet by motivating targeted investments in nature."

In later years, the core partnership expanded to include the University of Minnesota, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Stockholm Resilience Center, together with over three hundred collaborating institutions.

Its signature software, InVEST, is open source, co-developed with users, and now used in 185 countries to reveal the values of nature in specific decisions, and the risks and costs of its loss.

As co-founder and Stanford faculty director of the Natural Capital Project, Daily "serves as [the organization's] chief emissary to financial and government leaders."

In 2006, Daily became a member of the board of directors of The Nature Conservancy.

She has since published a dozen further books, including The Power of Trees (2012) and One Tree (2018) with Charles J. Katz, Green Growth that Works: Natural Capital Policy and Finance Mechanisms from Around the World (2019) with Lisa Mandle, Zhiyun Ouyang, and James Salzman, and Rural Livelihood and Environmental Sustainability in China (2020) with Jie Li, Shuzhuo Li, and Marcus Feldman.

Daily served as the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in Sustainability Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2013.

Daily's academic profile at the Center for Conservation Biology states that "Daily’s scientific research is on countryside biogeography and the future dynamics of biodiversity change."

In an interview, Daily remarked that "'Countryside biogeography' is a new conceptual framework for elucidating the fates of populations, species, and ecosystems in ‘countryside’ – the growing fraction of Earth's unbuilt land surface whose ecosystem qualities are strongly influenced by humanity."

To forecast what elements of nature will survive into the future, Daily studies the capacity of nature reserves and agricultural systems to sustain plants, animals, insects, and other organisms.

Using findings from research done in countryside biogeography, Daily, and researchers like her, is attempting to determine what "species are most important and most merit protection" and "what is the scientific basis for deciding" the relative importance of species within a given ecosystem.

When asked "which species/systems most merit protection?"

Daily responded that she is "actively attempting to link projected changes in biodiversity and ecosystems to changes in 'services' to humanity."

She went on to cite "production of goods," "life-support processes," "life-fulfilling conditions" and "options (genetic diversity for future use)" as the services that ecosystems/species provide for people.

To characterize the values of nature and the risks and costs of its loss, she advances the interdisciplinary science of ecosystem services, the benefits of nature to people.

As one of the co-founders of the Natural Capital Project, Daily employs her research practically by working "with private landowners, economists, lawyers, business people, and government agencies to incorporate environmental issues into business practice and public policy."

As of 2020, Daily serves in all three of these positions.