Holly Gibbs is a geographer who studies how and why people use land around the world and what these changes mean for the future of our planet. Trained as a physical scientist she focuses on interdisciplinary, applied questions at the intersection of human-environment interactions, globalization, environment, and policy. She heads a highly skilled team of staff scientists, economists, GIS analysts, cartographers, and student researchers who tackle complex challenges in Land System Science.
Gibbs has pioneered novel approaches that integrate Big Data, AI-based modeling, spatial analysis, remote sensing imagery, and econometrics with ground-based information on social and biophysical conditions. She uses this framework to advance our understanding of the causes, patterns, and consequences of land-use change at the global scale, with particular emphasis on tropical deforestation in Brazil and cropland expansion and private property conservation in the United States.
Her recent research focuses on tracing the land sources of newly expanding croplands and understanding how policies and market interventions shape land-use outcomes. She has played a leading role in evaluating company-led zero-deforestation commitments in agricultural supply chains, particularly for soy and cattle production in the Brazilian Amazon and beyond. As public scrutiny of deforestation intensified over the past decade, the agricultural sector responded with commitments to eliminate deforestation from supply chains. Gibbs was among the first researchers to rigorously assess what these promises meant on the ground by combining econometrics, field surveys, and spatial data linking thousands of properties to specific companies. She translated these scientific advances into practice by developing a deforestation monitoring tool that is now used by meatpacking companies in Brazil.
In the United States, Gibbs advances solutions for agricultural sustainability across local to national scales, with a particular attention on how federal policies shape land and water resource use. More recently, she is has begun leading new approaches to examine how private land owners – from ranchers to suburban homeowners –can contribute meaningfully to conservation, climate, and biodiversity goals. By expanding the focus beyond large-scale commodity systems, this work explores the untapped potential of privately managed landscapes to deliver environmental benefits at scale.
Since joining University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2011, Gibbs has served as PI or Co-PI on research awards totaling more than $65 million, including over $23 million directly supporting Global Land Use and Environment Lab (GLUE) research. She has published in leading journals such as Science, Nature, and PNAS, and her work has been cited more than 39,000 times. She has been included in Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers list (top 0.1% in Web of Science) for the past three years.
Gibbs received the Gaylord Nelson Distinguished Professorship in 2025 and the American Geophysical Union Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award and UW–Madison Vilas Mid-Career Investigator Award in 2024. Additional honors include the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship (2020), the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Faculty Achievement (2017), and multiple teaching awards. In 2018, Gibbs received an Office of Economic Cooperation and Development Research Fellowship for her sabbatical in New Zealand. She previously received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2016) and the University Housing Honored Instructor Award (2015).
Gibbs is deeply committed to teaching and mentoring. She has taught hundreds of undergraduates in large lecture courses, developed multiple graduate seminars, and created capstone experiences that connect students directly with real-world sustainability challenges. She encourages students to engage with policy and outreach opportunities during their training, often leading semester-long projects that partner with local communities to produce lasting change. To support these efforts, she and her collaborators have secured multiple Sustainability Innovation in Research and Education (SIRE) grants and additional teaching awards.
Before joining UW–Madison, Gibbs was a David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow in the Program on Food Security and Environment at Stanford University. She earned her Ph.D. from UW–Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) with support from a U.S. Department of Energy Global Change Environmental Fellowship. Earlier in her career, she worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she led remote sensing and GIS research on global carbon and water cycle projects. She holds a B.S. with Distinction in Natural Resources and an M.S. in Environmental Science from The Ohio State University.
