Dibang Valley, eastern Indian Himalaya

I am a Project Manager at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. I design and oversee long-term species monitoring and evaluation frameworks in community-owned & managed forests in eastern Himalaya. I also train research staff, build partnerships with the local communities and government bodies, and develop conservation strategies.

I was a Senior Research Associate at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. I identified habitat threats and developed sampling and analytical frameworks for species monitoring in community-owned & managed lands of Arunachal Pradesh, the largest eastern Indian Himalayan state.

I studied how climate change and land-use land-cover change affect distributions, community assemblages, and niches of eastern Himalayan birds at different spatial and temporal scales using various statistical and ecological models. I was supervised by Prof Sonya Clegg and Prof Tim Coulson at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. I was fully funded by the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development towards my degree program at Somerville College.

As a Junior Project Fellow at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, I documented traditional knowledge of six indigenous tribes of Northeast India regarding the consumption of edible insects. I also explored general trends on insect decline with the help of traditional ecological knowledge.

As a Research Assistant at CEDAR Himalaya, I assessed the changing bird communities and composition patterns in eight land-use land-cover categories of Jaintia Hills, part of Indo-Burman hotspot, by undertaking extensive avian and habitat surveys in one of the remotest tropical forests of the Indian Subcontinent.