Doctoral Research
My doctoral research focuses on mangrove ecosystems on the east coast of India. As I started my doctoral studies quest, I chose to work on mangroves because I fancied them for their resilience. I also found them to be extremely underrepresented and neglected ecosystems. And saw parallels in their existence with other worldly injustices and gender disparities.
My research uses the ‘blue carbon’ narrative to understand place-based conservation challenges of mangrove ecosystems. I use different approaches in my research . An ecological lens that investigates how mangroves are changing with large-scale disturbance events like tropical storms or small-scale disturbances like firewood extraction. I also use a social science lens to connect the historical legacies of human presence and dependence in these systems and bring forth the gendered nuances of mangrove forest protection.
Parts of my dissertation research have been published in various scientific journals.
1. One of my chapters look at how firewood extraction impacts mangrove vegetation composition, structure and biomass storage. We found overall biomass was lower in harvested plots but large DBH trees were found more in harvested plots than non-harvested ones indicating selective harvesting pressures as well as conservation of large-sized trees by local communities. This work was published in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science.
2. We also looked at the impact of tropical storms on productivity of mangroves along different parts of the Indian coast and found that in the last 20 odd years mangrove productivity has increased implying a net-positive impact of storms on mangroves. This work was published in Scientific Reports.
My doctoral research focuses on mangrove ecosystems on the east coast of India. As I started my doctoral studies quest, I chose to work on mangroves because I fancied them for their resilience. I also found them to be extremely underrepresented and neglected ecosystems. And saw parallels in their existence with other worldly injustices and gender disparities.
My research uses the ‘blue carbon’ narrative to understand place-based conservation challenges of mangrove ecosystems. I use different approaches in my research . An ecological lens that investigates how mangroves are changing with large-scale disturbance events like tropical storms or small-scale disturbances like firewood extraction. I also use a social science lens to connect the historical legacies of human presence and dependence in these systems and bring forth the gendered nuances of mangrove forest protection.
Parts of my dissertation research have been published in various scientific journals.
1. One of my chapters look at how firewood extraction impacts mangrove vegetation composition, structure and biomass storage. We found overall biomass was lower in harvested plots but large DBH trees were found more in harvested plots than non-harvested ones indicating selective harvesting pressures as well as conservation of large-sized trees by local communities. This work was published in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science.
2. We also looked at the impact of tropical storms on productivity of mangroves along different parts of the Indian coast and found that in the last 20 odd years mangrove productivity has increased implying a net-positive impact of storms on mangroves. This work was published in Scientific Reports.
Past Projects
Mapping the Asian savannas
I worked with Drs. Mahesh Sankaran, Jayashree Ratnam and Kyle Tomlinson to highlight the historical, present and future legacy of the Savanna biome in Asia. A major outcome of this work was developing a spatial representation of Asian savannas based on an analysis of climate domains of the biome on other continents.
This work was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Future changes of vegetation in India
I used machine learning techniques to understand the current and future distribution of vegetation in the Indian subcontinent. This work was published in Current Science.
Snow cover trends of Sikkim Himalaya
As part of the DBT-Sikkim project (supported by the Dept. of Biotechnology, Govt. of India), I looked at the changes in snow cover distribution of the region. A time series approach was utilised to analyse the trends in snow cover fraction for the snow seasons from October 2000 to March 2014 using the daily MODIS snow cover product (500m) based on the normalised difference snow index.
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