Time period/Baraboo: 1935-50 periodic; 1976 -2011 full-time
Submitted by: Aldo Leopold Foundation

Nina is remembered as a scientist, conservationist, philosopher, and humanitarian by an international community of colleagues.

Nina was deeply connected to the property that her family purchased outside of Baraboo when she was a teenager. That property, the Leopold Shack and Farm, is now a National Historic Landmark. It was her family’s experience in restoring the property that inspired her father, Aldo Leopold, to write his now famous book –A Sand County Almanac.

Nina and her second husband Charles Bradley retired to the Baraboo area when they built the Bradley Study Center, not far from the Leopold Shack on the Leopold Reserve in 1976. Upon returning to the area Nina returned to a practice she had conducted with her father when she was young: recording data on the timing of annual natural events like the return of migrating birds, the first snow fall, and blooming plants. This practice is known as phenology. She would later go on to serve as senior author of a 1999 study published in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” that analyzed decades of these phenological records that suggested how climate change was affecting the region and its native ecosystems.

Nina was also instrumental in establishing the Aldo Leopold Foundation and in constructing the Leopold Center. Nina died at the age of 93 in May 2011 at her home in Baraboo, Wisconsin.