A new era of Indian ecology looks to its horizons, and to the ground
Wildlife ecology in India looks different today than it did a decade ago. Climate change, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and rapid development are all reshaping
Wildlife ecology in India looks different today than it did a decade ago. Climate change, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and rapid development are all reshaping ecosystems faster than scholars can document them. Thus, ecologists are interested in how biodiversity has changed as well as how it is likely to change next. Just these questions shaped the second Indian Wildlife Ecology Conference (IWEC), at Ashoka University in Sonepat, Haryana, on July 10-12, where researchers from across India came together to discuss the future of wildlife ecology in the country. Conceived by the late wildlife biologist Ajith Kumar as a national platform for India’s wildlife ecologists to exchange ideas, IWEC has grown into a forum where researchers from universities, government agencies, NGOs, and field stations together figure out where the discipline is heading — using insights into evolutionary history, long-term monitoring, public policy, technology, and public health. The inaugural conference, held in 2024, demonstrated the breadth of this community. At the second conference, this year, the participants repeatedly returned to the same question: how can ecologists anticipate ecological change? As Indian ecology reaches towards prediction across biological scales, disciplines, and even the divide between science and policy, much of that ambition still depends on staying close to the ground, to fieldwork and local institutions. Biodiversity at scale The conference’s three paired plenary sessions showed how wildlife ecology is expanding across biological scales, taking in evolutionary history, ecosystem change, bird conservation, citizen science, and animal physiology. The throughline was that predicting the future requires evidence spanning both the deep past and the decisions animals every day make to survive. The opening plenary traced biodiversity through deep evolutionary time. Jahnavi Joshi (CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad) spoke of how geological history and climate gradients shaped the diversity of woody plants in the Western Ghats. Using phylogenetic analyses, she examined whether different parts of the mountain range function as evolutionary ‘cradles’, where new species originate, or ‘museums’, where ancient lineages persist. She argued that both patterns can help predict how species will respond to future environmental change. Mahesh Sankaran (Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru) turned to the future of India’s montane grasslands under climate change, drawing on projections from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show how rising temperature, increasingly variable rainfall, and extreme weather will reshape these already vulnerable ecosystems, alongside other human-driven pressures such as altered nutrient cycles and land-use change.
The BriefWire