Global change effects on tropical forests
The tropical forest carbon sink has the largest contribution on land to offsetting atmospheric carbon emissions and mitigating global climate change. Yet, its quantification has the highest uncertainty among terrestrial biomes. I study tropical forest dynamics trying to understand the effects of climate and global change on forests as a whole. I am interested in measuring and modelling processes at the individual tree level, to investigate variability in tree growth across species, sites and years. I currently work with ForestGEO, a leading network of long-term monitoring plots. In collaboration with this global network of plots and scientists, I am leveraging long-term records of manual dendrometer band measurements to model tree growth dynamics.
Current projects: 1. Sensitivity of tree growth to drought in seasonally dry tropical forests 2. Climate sensitivity of tropical tree growth across sites and species.
Forecasting tropical forest ecosystems
Forests are dynamical systems and their management requires regular, direct data from researchers to anticipate changes and proactively plan against detrimental impacts. This requires thinking beyond basic predictive modelling frameworks - models that ask “what if?” - to ecosystem forecasting framworks - models that inform “what next?”. Currently, I am building a hierarchical Bayesian model to forecast tree growth at a temperate and tropical ForestGEO site using measurements made from three complementary techniques : five-year censuses of the whole plot using diameter tape, annual dendrometer band censuses of some individuals across species and tree ring measurements from a few species.
I am also a member of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative.
Data and knowledge equity for forest futures
Although the scientific world has been increasing efforts to understand and manage tropical ecosystems, these efforts can often reflect the biases inherent in an unequal world. This is most stark when you examine who gets to participate in and benefit from the tropical ecological research. Communities whose well-being is closely linked to forest health often have limited access to information collected from their backyards because of several systemic barriers, including language. These inequities operate across scales and often compound/intersect. Young people from conservation priority landscapes have limited access to enter the world of conservation. Even within the academic community, researchers from the Global South (large overlap with the tropics) are affected by legacies of inequalities. This equity differential in tropical ecology can also feed back as poorly informed science and ineffective policy. A part of my work is to bridge these gaps in ways that fit with my expertise.
I have been co-leading INvenTree, an effort at harmonising disparate datasets on tree inventories in India to benefit research and researchers.
I am a co-founder of Local Voices in Conservation, a summer school for young professionals from the Andaman Islands interested in Conservation. In the past, I have worked on projects on biocultural conservation to understand forest health. And finally, I write articles on basic ecology in English and collaborate to write in Malayalam, to improve access to knowledge beyond scientific papers.