About

Melissa K. Nelson, Ph.D., is a professor of Indigenous Sustainability in the School of Sustainability, College of Global Futures at ASU. She is an Indigenous ecologist, writer, editor, media-maker, and award-winning scholar-activist. Her work is rooted in transdisciplinary and community-based scholarship dedicated to Indigenous rights and sustainability, biocultural heritage, environmental justice, intercultural solidarity, and the renewal and celebration of community health and cultural arts. Dr. Nelson actively advocates for Indigenous Peoples' rights and sustainable lifeways across higher education, nonprofits, and philanthropy, with a particular focus on elevating Indigenous sciences and Indigenous food sovereignty at local, regional, and global levels. Her research interests include Indigenous knowledge systems, Native food systems, Indigenous-led conservation, biocultural restoration, decolonization, religion and ecology, environmental humanities, and Indigenous media. She has led numerous community-based projects through her work at The Cultural Conservancy, an Indigenous-led nonprofit organization she served as founding executive director and CEO from 1993 to 2021. Dr. Nelson is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and has a distinguished academic background with a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. Her scholarly contributions include editing anthologies on Indigenous teachings for sustainability and traditional ecological knowledge, as well as publishing chapters and essays in various academic and popular books and journals, emphasizing Indigenous persistence, ecological traditions, and Indigenous-led resurgence for planetary health.

Research topics

• Geography
• Environmental science
• Environmental resource management
• Computer Science
• Natural resource economics
• Telecommunications
• Economics
• Environmental planning
• Ecology
• Cartography
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• The Resilience of Socioecological Landscapes:

  University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Geography
  • Environmental resource management
  • Environmental science
  DOI

• In Sync, but Barely in Touch

  University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2022 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Telecommunications
  DOI

• A Landscape Perspective on Climate-Driven Risks to Food Security: Exploring the Relationship between Climate and Social Transformation in the Prehispanic U.S. Southwest

  American Antiquity · 2020 · 22 citations

  • Geography
  • Environmental resource management
  • Natural resource economics

  Spatially and temporally unpredictable rainfall patterns presented food production challenges to small-scale agricultural communities, requiring multiple risk-mitigating strategies to increase food security. Although site-based investigations of the relationship between climate and agricultural production offer insights into how individual communities may have created long-term adaptations to manage risk, the inherent spatial variability of climate-driven risk makes a landscape-scale perspective valuable. In this article, we model risk by evaluating how the spatial structure of ancient climate conditions may have affected the reliability of three major strategies used to reduce risk: drawing upon social networks in time of need, hunting and gathering of wild resources, and storing surplus food. We then explore how climate-driven changes to this reliability may relate to archaeologically observed social transformations. We demonstrate the utility of this methodology by comparing the Salinas and Cibola regions in the prehispanic U.S. Southwest to understand the complex relationship among climate-driven threats to food security, risk-mitigation strategies, and social transformations. Our results suggest key differences in how communities buffered against risk in the Cibola and Salinas study regions, with the structure of precipitation influencing the range of strategies to which communities had access through time.

  DOI

Recent grants

• BE/CNH: Long-Term Coupled Socioecological Change in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico

  NSF · $541k · 2005–2009

• Resilience and Vulnerability to Climate Change: A Collaboration between NABO and LTVTP

  NSF · $66k · 2011–2014

• CNH: The Complexities of Ecological and Social Diversity: A Long-Term Perspective

  NSF · $1.4M · 2011–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Michelle Hegmon

  38 shared

• David M. Hanson

  Stony Brook University

  22 shared

• Karen Schollmeyer

  Archaeology Southwest

  21 shared

• Matthew A. Peeples

  Arizona State University

  13 shared

• Keith Kintigh

  Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris-Nord

  11 shared

• Stephanie Kulow

  9 shared

• Scott L. Anderson

  University of Utah

  9 shared

• J. Murakami

  National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology

  8 shared

Education

• B.A., Ecology

  University of California, Santa Cruz

• Ph.D., Ecology

  University of California, Davis

Similar researchers at Arizona State University

• Greg Asnerh-157
• Philip Christensenh-130
• Jianguo Wuh-119
• Carolyn Comptonh-118
• Osvaldo Salah-114