William F. Laurance (born 12 October 1957), also known as Bill Laurance, is Distinguished Research Professor at James Cook University, Australia and has been elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the British Royal Society. He has received an Australian Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. He held the Prince Bernhard Chair for International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands from 2010 to 2014.
William F. Laurance grew up in the western US, in Oregon and Idaho. He initially aspired to direct his own zoo, but later turned to ecology and conservation biology.
Since he was interested in nature conservation, he decided in the early 1980s to study imperiled tropical forests for his PhD. During this time, he also became involved in some heated conservation issues in Australia and elsewhere.
Laurance has published eight books and more than 800 scientific and popular articles. These include two edited volumes, as well as analyses of conservation-policy challenges in the Brazilian Amazon, Gabon, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea. He has also synthesized changing trends, new initiatives, and major debates in tropical conservation science and policy.
He is among the most highly cited scientists globally in the fields of ecology, environmental science, and evolution His works have been cited over 115,000 times, and his Hirsch's h index of 162 (as of May 2026) is the highest of any environmental scientist or ecologist in Australia and ranked number 6 globally. He has published more than 70 papers to date in Science and Nature.
He has conducted long-term research across the world's tropics, from the Amazon Basin to the Asia-Pacific region and Congo Basin.
In his long-term studies of habitat fragmentation in the Amazon Basin, he introduced concepts, including "biomass collapse", the "hyperdynamism hypothesis", the "landscape-divergence hypothesis", the large spatial scale of some edge effects, the key role of matrix tolerance in determining species' responses to fragmentation, and the importance of synergisms between fragmentation and other environmental insults.
His scientific interests include assessing the impacts of deforestation, logging, hunting, wildfires, road expansion, and climatic change on tropical ecosystems and biodiversity.
Laurance has also studied the drivers of global amphibian declines; quantifying the threats to tropical protected areas; evaluating potential effects of global atmospheric changes on the species composition, dynamics; and carbon storage of intact tropical forests; and understanding how droughts affect tropical tree communities.
Laurance is also involved with the Environmental Leadership and Training Initiative, a $15 million program run by Yale University and the Smithsonian Institution to train environmental decision-makers across Latin America and Southeast Asia. Laurance also writes in popular magazines about environmental policies in the tropics.
His awards include the 2008 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology (co-winner with Thomas Lovejoy), the Heineken Environment Prize, and a Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Conservation Biology.
Cassowary Prize for Tropical Research and Conservation, 2018
Outstanding Contributions to Nature Conservation, Zoological Society of London, 2015.
The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and A. H. Heineken Foundation, 2012.
Distinguished Service Award, Society for Conservation Biology, 2011.
Six-time recipient of the Faculty of 1000 Selection for Outstanding Articles.
Four-time winner of Australia's Best Science Writing Prize.
Top 50-most cited papers in Biological Conservation.