Paired Plenaries: Conversations in Indian Wildlife Ecology

Asad R. Rahmani, is the former Director of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). He is a Scientific Consultant to The Corbett Foundation and Hem Chandra Mahindra Trust and in the Board of BNHS. He has served various MoEF committees. He has written 26 books, nearly 160 peer-reviewed scientific papers, 90 book reviews, nearly 75 editorials, and more than 350 popular articles on nature conservation. He was the Global Council member of BirdLife International, UK (2006-2013), and Chairman, BirdLife Asia Council (2006-2013). Dr Rahmani was the Executive Editor of Journal of BNHS, and was Editor of Hornbill, Mistnet and Buceros, popular magazines of BNHS. Dr Rahmani's main interest is in grassland and wetland birds, and to highlight the plight of lesser-known species and habitats. His latest book is Living with Birds, published by Juggernaut and Pitta.

Ashwin Viswanathan is a mechanical engineer turned ecologist, and a long-time birdwatcher. In his early research, he studied rainforest ecology. He later became increasingly fascinated by the power of public participation in science. His research now focuses on monitoring bird populations in India, primarily via nationwide birdwatcher groups and citizen science.

Jahnavi Joshi is an evolutionary biologist at the CSIR–Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India. Along with her research group, she explores patterns and processes underlying species distribution, diversification, and community assembly in Asian tropical forests, using phylogenetic comparative methods.

Mahesh Sankaran is a Professor of Ecology at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, Bengaluru. He is a community and ecosystem ecologist whose research focuses on understanding how climate change impacts the distribution, structure and functioning of tropical ecosystems globally, with a focus on savannas and grasslands, and more recently, forests. He is particularly interested in applying this knowledge to the restoration of degraded lands in a changing climate. He has also contributed to shaping international policy on climate change, biodiversity and land through his work with the IPCC and IPBES assessments on land degradation, climate change and biodiversity. He is a J. C. Bose Fellow and currently holds the R.M. Tulpule Chair Professorship for Global Change at NCBS. He is also an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy, and is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for Life Sciences.

Maria Thaker is a Professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Her lab takes an integrative and comparative approach to studying phenotypic form and function. This involves exploring the functional integration between morphology, behaviour, and physiology within and across species. Her lab is particularly interested in understanding the implications of environmental change, such as urbanisation and climate warming, on animal responses. She and her students are currently exploring the function and evolution of colour in herpetofauna, thermal adaptation in a range of taxa, and how stress and nutrition modulate behaviour.

Anusha Shankar heads the Wildlife Ecophysiology Lab at TIFR Hyderabad. The lab is starting to study how animals (mainly birds) in India manage their energy and time across various environmental gradients (e.g., urbanisation, elevation). She loves collecting animal pee to measure energy expenditure, which she did a lot of during her PhD with hummingbirds in the US and Ecuador. Anusha is a Maxwell-Hanrahan Awardee in Field Biology, a National Geographic Explorer and Young Leader, and loves mentoring students, dancing salsa and bachata, and reading fiction.