Forest Isbell is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior and a Fellow at the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.
His research considers how human activities are changing biodiversity, and how changes in biodiversity cause changes in ecosystem functioning, stability, and services. Many of his studies focus on plant diversity in grasslands and forests. He also reintroduced bison to an oak savanna. His research has been published in top scientific journals and he has been recognized as a Clarivate highly cited researcher each year since 2018.
He teaches an undergraduate Ecology course at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve and a graduate course on Scientific Writing.
He has served as the director of the MnDRIVE Environment program (2022-2023), the associate director of Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve (2015-2022), guest editor at PNAS, and on the editorial boards of Ecology Letters, Oecologia, and other journals.
He is actively involved in science-policy efforts, currently serving as a lead author of the second global assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 2025-2028) and an author of the First National Nature Assessment of the U.S. (2024-2026). Previously he served as an author of expert information documents for the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity's Global Biodiversity Framework (2020, 2022) and a lead author of previous IPBES assessments (2015-2018).