Instructor
Megan Kelso LinkedIn
MEGAN KELSO, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz Coastal Resilience Lab, focuses her research on how nature can be included in risk reduction development projects, industry risk assessments, and risk transfer tools, such as insurance. With a background in coastal wetland ecology and the human well-being impacts of conservation and development projects, she works across the environment, health, and development sectors with the aim of producing research that both informs effective conservation and improves the well-being of local communities. Before coming to UC Santa Cruz, she was a NatureNet Science Fellow at UCLA and The Nature Conservancy, studying the effectiveness of integrated conservation and development approaches, such as payments for ecosystem services, community-based conservation, one health, population health environment, and sustainable supply chains. She also studied rates of mangrove conversion to shrimp aquaculture ponds in Indonesia. Keslo earned her doctorate at UC Davis, where she studied tradeoffs and synergies between carbon storage and other important wetland management goals such as invasive plant eradication and nutrient pollution mitigation in California salt marshes. Before graduate school, she led community-based wetland restoration projects for four years in the San Francisco Bay and Point Reyes National Seashore.