Nichole Barger is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States. Barger received her Master’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and holds a Ph.D. from Colorado State University. Barger works as an ecologist to support sustainable land management and restoration of a broad variety of ecosystems throughout the world.

Barger was a coordinating lead author on the IPBES global land degradation and restoration assessment. She is also the Research Director of Canyonlands Research Center in southeastern Utah. In her research program, Barger works in partnership with diverse governmental entities in the U.S. on land degradation and restoration issues such as the ecological risks of fire mitigation treatments, historical drivers and biogeochemical responses to woody plant encroachment, forest decline and regeneration, and more recently restoration of degraded dryland ecosystems with a specific focus on soil ecology.

Barger also has extensive research experience working on conservation and management issues in dryland ecosystems across the globe. She has worked with international research teams in the semi-arid grasslands of Inner Mongolia and anthropogenic grassland ecosystems of Venezuela, in addition to work in southern Africa on plant invasions in the biodiversity hot spot of the Cape Floristic region of South Africa and vegetation dynamics of the Namib Desert of Namibia.