Strengthening conservation ties with India

The Scheme has been established to stimulate exchange of ideas and academic collaboration between India and the University of Cambridge. It is named after its founder Dr Yusuf Hamied, Chairman of Cipla Ltd, India, and an alumnus of the University's Department of Chemistry and Christ's College.

Dr Krithi Karanth (pictured) is Assistant Director at the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS)and the Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), both in Bangalore. She is also an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University in New York.

Professor Andrew Balmford of the Department of Zoology invited Dr Karanth to visit Cambridge in order to initiate collaboration on the collation of key data for assessing the status of India’s Protected Areas (PAs)

The data will focus on status, threats and management effectiveness of the country’s 600+ protected areas which cover less than 4% of the total land area but support much of the country’s biological diversity, including the largest populations of the world’s tigers and Asiatic elephants.

Dr. Karanth is interested in interactions between protected areas and people, biodiversity patterns and species extinctions, human-wildlife conflicts, nature-based tourism and impacts of conservation interventions and policies such as resettlement.

She has conducted research in India since 2001 and has published more than 15 scientific articles and edited a special issue on India for the Journal of Biological Conservation (Volume 143, December 2010).

Her current research examines wildlife habitat use, land use change, tourism impacts, and human-wildlife conflicts in ten Indian wildlife reserves.

Her interest in wildlife began at a very young age when she accompanied her father Dr. Ullas Karanth as he radio-tracked tigers in Nagarahole.

Dr Karanth has a track record of working with key government agencies and NGOs across India. She has a PhD in Environmental Science and Policy from Duke University (2008), a Master's degree in Environmental Science from Yale (2003), and B.S (Environmental Science) and B.A (Geography) degrees from the University of Florida (2001).

The Centre for Wildlife Studies practices science-based conservation, aligned with the WCS mission, with special emphasis on the ecology and conservation of the tiger and other large mammals.

Professor Balmford is a co-founder of the Cambridge Conservation Forum and of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.

His research focuses on conservation planning, the costs and benefits of effective conservation, evaluating the success of conservation interventions, and exploring how conservation efforts might best be reconciled with other activities, especially in developing countries.

He tries to tackle these questions through fieldwork, analyses of large databases, and modelling, and strives to work with colleagues in other disciplines.

He is extremely keen on building close working relationships between conservation scientists and conservation practitioners.

At the Cambridge-Hamied Lecture, at a Cambridge Conservation Initiative seminar in the Department of Geography, Dr Karanth presented work on mammal extinctions and conservation resettlement in India.

Karanth and others (2010) published a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London examining the influence of several factors on the local extinctions of 25 large mammal species in India over the last 150 years.

She also spoke about research examining experiences of families that were voluntarily relocated as part of India’s most successful conservation resettlement project in Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary.

Professor Balmford commented: "India is an exceptionally important country for conservation, both  in terms of both its biodiversity and its growing reputation for world-class applied research. We're extremely keen to build on the links we already have with Indian colleagues - and Dr Karanth's visit was an important part of planning those developments."