 He was awarded the Crafoord Prize in biosciences 2011 "for his pioneering studies on how spatial variation affects the dynamics of animal and plant populations".In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).In 2016, Hanski was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology for opening up an area of ecology that explains how species survive in fragmented habitats and allows to quantify extinction thresholds.