The numbers are in. University of Vermont Professor Taylor Ricketts has made Thomson Reuters’ prestigious list of the world’s most-cited scholars for the second consecutive year.
In its annual list of Highly Cited Researchers, Thomson Reuters recognizes Ricketts among the world’s 130 most influential researchers for the category of Environment and Ecology.
Thomson Reuters’ list recognizes more than 3,000 global researchers across 21 science and social science fields – from Agricultural Sciences to Space Science – representing institutions and agencies across North America and five other continents.
Ricketts, the lone honoree in his field from Vermont, is Gund Professor at UVM’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at UVM. Ricketts and his team conduct interdisciplinary research on real-world conservation problems in Vermont and worldwide.
“I’ve been lucky to have fun and productive collaborators throughout my career,” says Ricketts, who joined UVM in 2011 after leading World Wildlife Fund’s Conservation Science Program. “It is great to see our work having an impact, and an honor to be recognized alongside colleagues I admire so deeply.”
As a researcher, Ricketts seeks to answer the question: How will society meet the needs of humans and nature in an increasingly crowded, changing world? He is a pioneering scholar in the field of Ecosystem Services, which seeks to quantify the benefits that nature provides to people through forests, wetlands, reefs, and other ecosystems.
Much of Ricketts’ work explores wild bees and their essential role as pollinators of global food crops. Ricketts recently co-led the first study to map U.S. wild bee abundances and their importance for agriculture, and he served as a review editor for the U.N.’s recent report on the global status of pollinators. He is also using big data to investigate the relationship between the environment and human health.
At the World Wildlife Fund, Ricketts co-founded the Natural Capital Project, a science-action partnership among Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, WWF and Nature Conservancy. He has authored more than 100 scientific publications and served as lead author on a 5-year, U.N.-sponsored effort to assess global ecosystems and their contributions to human wellbeing.
To compile the Highly Cited Researchers List, Thomson Reuters, an international media and information firm, analyzed scientific publication citation data from 2003 to 2013 and narrowed it all down to the 120,793 most highly cited papers. Each of these papers, including Ricketts’, ranked in the top one percent around the globe most often cited by other researchers. Those with the largest number of highly cited papers were named Highly Cited Researchers.