Daily’s academic profile at the Center for Conservation Biology states that “Daily’s scientific research is on countryside biogeography and the future dynamics of biodiversity change.” In an interview, Daily remarked that “‘Countryside biogeography’ is a new conceptual framework for elucidating the fates of populations, species, and ecosystems in ‘countryside’ – the growing fraction of Earth’s unbuilt land surface whose ecosystem qualities are strongly influenced by humanity.”

In 2005, Daily was appointed as the Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and was made the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. As of 2013, Daily still holds all three of these positions.

In 2005, Daily (the project leader from Stanford), along with partners at The Nature Conservancy, the University of Minnesota, and the World Wildlife Fund, established the Natural Capital Project. The organization’s stated goal is to “improve the state of biodiversity and human well-being by motivating greater and more cost-effective investments in both.” As one of the directors of the Natural Capital Project, Daily “serves as [the organization’s] chief emissary to financial and government leaders.” In 2006, Daily became a member of the board of directors of the Nature Conservancy. Daily served as the inaugural Humanitas Visiting Professor in Sustainability Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2013.

The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable was co-written by Daily and Katherine Ellison and was published on September 1, 2003, by Island Press. The book presents different cases studies where companies or governments were able to actually profit from their conservation efforts. One chapter describes how New York “decided to meet federal requirements to improve water quality with a less expensive, though more controversial, option of protecting watershed integrity through land purchases and development limits, rather than adopt the technological solution of a multibillion dollar treatment facility.” While another chapter offers “an assessment of plans to manage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by developing a worldwide system of carbon trading patterned on the U.S. experience with pollution”

Daily has received numerous prestigious awards and honors throughout her academic career, including the 21st Century Scientist Award (2000), The Sophie Prize (2008), The International Cosmos Prize (2009), The 16th Annual Heinz Award with special focus on global change, the Midori Prize (2010), the Volvo Environment Prize (2012), the Blue Planet Prize (2017), and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (2020). She has received the 2018 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of Ecology and Conservation Biology, jointly with Georgina Mace for developing vital tools facilitating science-based policies “to combat species loss.”

Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems was published in 1997 by Island Press. Nature’s Services starts off with an introduction from Daily titled “What are Ecosystem Services” and another introductory piece by Harold Mooney and Paul Ehrlich that seeks to detail the “fragmentary history” of ecosystem services. After the introductions, the book is split into four distinct sections that address different elements of ecosystem services.

In 1992, Daily was awarded the Winslow/Heinz Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group. In 1995 Daily became a Bing Interdisciplinary Research Scientist in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. During her time as a research scientist, Daily served as the editor for Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems, which provides examples of the benefits that ecosystems can provide for societies and ideas for how to quantify the value of these services. The Heinz Foundation noted that Nature’s Services “has served as a model for ecosystems regulation in several regions of the world and was a catalyst for the U.N.’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.” After 7 years as a research scientist, Daily was appointed as an associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and as a senior fellow at the Institute of International Studies (both at Stanford University) in 2002. In 2002, Daily also co-wrote the book The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable with Katherine Ellison.

Daily received her B.S. in biological sciences from Stanford University in 1986. She then went on to earn her M.S. in biological sciences at Stanford University in 1987 and received her Ph.D. in biological sciences from Stanford University in 1992.

Gretchen C. Daily (born October 19, 1964 Washington D.C.) is the Bing Professor of Environmental Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Her main research interests include biogeography, conservation biology and ecology. Daily is also a co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Daily is a board member at the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics and the Nature Conservancy.