Heather Throop is an ecosystem scientist who studies how global-scale changes influence arid and semi-arid ecosystems. She has a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Life Sciences at ASU. She is also director of the Environmental Life Sciences PhD program.

Professor Throop studies how carbon and nutrients cycle through plants, soils, and the atmosphere. Much of her work addresses how these cycles respond to human-caused changes in the environment, such as climate change and changing human land use.

Her work is primarily based in arid and semi-arid environments. These 'drylands' contain a large and rapidly increasing portion of the world's human population, particularly in developing nations where human livelihoods are often tightly linked to sustainable use of drylands. Throop's current projects includes work in drylands sites in Arizona, New Mexico, eastern Oregon, Australia and Namibia.