Sustainability scientist at Colorado State University, with appointments in the Department of Atmospheric Science and the School of Global Environmental Sustainability. Patrick Keys studies climate change impacts, cross-scale risks and social-ecological teleconnections, and has built modeling tools for tracing how evaporation from land returns as rainfall downwind.
Contribution
Keys holds a PhD in sustainability science from Stockholm University, an MSc from the University of Washington and a BA in biology from Willamette University. His doctoral work examined how human changes to evaporation may affect precipitation over land downwind. Before his doctorate he founded an environmental consultancy working on food security, drought, conflict and climate adaptation.
He introduced the “precipitationshed,” the upwind area whose evaporation supplies a region’s rainfall, and in 2016 argued that moisture recycling should count as an ecosystem service. The research brief on Bioprecipitation cites the 2016 paper for moisture-recycling contributions to rainfall in tropical and continental-interior regions, and notes that these findings do not apply to the winter-rainfall Cape.
Selected works
- Keys, P.W., van der Ent, R.J., Gordon, L.J., Hoff, H., Nikoli, R. & Savenije, H.H.G. (2012). “Analyzing precipitationsheds to understand the vulnerability of rainfall dependent regions.” Biogeosciences, 9, 733-746.
- Keys, P.W., Wang-Erlandsson, L. & Gordon, L.J. (2016). “Revealing invisible water: moisture recycling as an ecosystem service.” PLOS ONE, 11(3), e0151993.
- Keys, P.W. et al. (2017). “Approaching moisture recycling governance.” Global Environmental Change.
Related pages
Sources
- Contact profile, Future Earth
- Author profile, The Conversation
- Keys, Wang-Erlandsson & Gordon (2016), PLOS ONE (PubMed Central)
Provenance
Written 23 October 2026 from the people named on Bioprecipitation, using public institutional profiles and published work. Public roles and publications only.