Dr. Sharolyn Anderson is a physical scientist with the National Park Service, Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division (NSNSD). Her current responsibilities are mainly focus on collaborating with partners to research the effects of noise and light on wildlife and visitor experience and assisting parks throughout the country with management of sound and lighting resources. These projects include spatial modeling of soundscapes and light pollution, aircraft monitor over NPS units, and using experimental design understanding the impacts of lighting on park resources and visitors experience. Sharolyn works with parks and partners to use scenarios to better understand the impacts of different decisions in regard to sound and lighting which affect the natural capital of the parks. This includes using ecosystems services to value the natural capital.

Before joining NSNSD in January 2017, she was faculty at Texas State University, University of Denver, and University of South Australia. Her research areas include light pollution, ecosystem services valuation, green infrastructure, spatial analysis, and modeling. Examples of her work related to the protection of night skies is using satellite night skies data (DMSP or VIIRS) as a proxy with other datasets to map impervious surfaces, human well-being, economic distributions, ecological footprints, characterizing landscape relationships, proxy measures of emergy, and monitoring the effectiveness of environmental policies. She has also been a member of national and international data working groups, e.g. GEO Human Planet Initiative (Global Human Settlement Layer), Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary, and Economics of Land Degradation. Sharolyn Anderson has a PhD in Geography with a specialization in Geographic Information Science. She has her BS in Computer Science and MA in Geography from the University of New Mexico.
She is a DarkSky Advocate in her spare time.