Elena Bennett

Dr. Elena Bennett is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Science at McGill University. Her work focuses on the interactions among ecosystem services and how we can manage these interactions for multifunctional working landscapes, using a landscape ecology and systems ecology perspective. She was the leader of the Montérégie Connection project that worked with stakeholders to understand the role of landscape connectivity in the provision of a dozen ecosystem services and how those might change across a range of future scenarios. She is now leading ResNet, a 100+ person NSERC Strategic Network that builds on the Montérégie Connection to compare ecosystem service provision in six exemplar working landscapes across Canada. Her most recent work focuses on using radical transformative experiments in society as ‘seeds’ to improve storytelling and sense-making about how we might achieve a “good Anthropocene”. Dr. Bennett was a Leopold Leadership Fellow (2012). She won the Macdonald Campus Award for (Undergraduate) Teaching Excellence in 2012 the Carrie M. Derick Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision in 2013, and the David Thomson Award for Graduate Supervision in 2022. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue interdisciplinary work on multifunctional agricultural landscapes of Canada in 2022. She is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada Scholars (2023) and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences (elected 2022)