Author Description

About the Author Anna A Sher is a full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Denver, where she has been faculty since 2003. She was a double major in Biology and Art at Earlham College, where she has also taught ecology as a Howard Hughes Fellow, visiting lecturer, and as the co-leader of the Earlham Study Abroad Kenya Program in1992, 2000, and 2002. She received her PhD from the University of New Mexico, where she also taught botany as a visiting lecturer. As a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Sher was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral research fellowship to conduct research on plant interactions in Israel at Ben Gurion University’s Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, and she also studied the ecology of an invasive grass at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Sher’s primary research focus has been on the ecological dynamics associated with the removal of invasive riparian plants. She is known as a leading expert in the ecology of Tamarix, a dominant exotic tree, and she was the lead editor of the first book exclusively on the topic. Her research interests and publications have spanned several areas within ecology, including not only restoration ecology, competition, and invasive species ecology, but also interactions between plants and soil chemistry, mycorrhizae, insect diversity and trophic cascades, ethnobotany, phenology, climate change, and rare species conservation. She is also coauthor of the textbook An Introduction to Conservation Biology, First Edition (Primack and Sher 2016). Dr. Sher has a particular interest in quantitative ecological methods, with her lab specializing in multivariate methods and spatial models at both individual organism and regional scales. She is currently principal investigator of a National Science Foundation award to investigate the human dimension of the restoration of dam- aged ecosystems, and she has been a TEDx speaker on the way ecosystems can teach us how to solve human probl