Research Projects

Climate change, species invasions and biodiversity loss have emerged as the greatest ecological threats of our time. At present, much of our understanding of the potential impacts such ‘global changes’ on ecosystem dynamics comes from experiments and long-term monitoring initiatives established elsewhere on the globe. In contrast, our understanding of how ecosystems in the Indian region are likely to respond to ongoing and future changes in climate and environmental drivers remains inadequate. Given that India is one of the world’s “mega-diverse” nations with a population of 1.4 billion that is still growing, understanding how climate change is likely to impact the functioning of its ecosystems is critical for their effective and sustainable management. The core of my research is embedded within this overarching context, and seeks to understand how different ‘global changes’ influence the richness, stability and functioning of ecological communities, particularly grasslands, and the ecosystem services they provide humans. Much of my research over the last several years has centred on experimentally investigating the impacts of multiple global change drivers on the functioning of different grassland and savanna ecosystems in India. These include temperature manipulations using open-top warming chambers (OTCs) to understand the potential impacts of global warming on high elevation grasslands of the Himalayas and the Western Ghats, precipitation manipulations using rainout shelters to understand the impacts of altered rainfall regimes and droughts on ecosystem processes in the arid rangelands of the trans-Himalaya, and manipulations of herbivory and nutrient availability through fencing and fertilization in Himalayan grasslands. This body of work has provided us with several key insights into the potential responses of Indian grassland communities to future global changes. Here, I aim to build on the foundations that I have developed, and leverage the long-term experimental and monitoring initiatives that I have established, to continue to address fundamental questions of both a scientific and applied nature relating to the impacts of multiple global change drivers on grassland communities in the Indian subcontinent. Specifically, I propose to expand the scope of my investigations to i) look at the interactive effects of multiple global change drivers on the functioning of arid and semi-arid grasslands in the Indian subcontinent, with an emphasis on understanding how responses are influenced by grazing, and ii) mechanistically investigate global change impacts on invasive woody plant performance in the montane forest-grassland mosaics of the Western Ghats, with implications for the restoration and conservation of these threatened ecosystems. These initiatives should provide us with a more nuanced understanding of how different grassland communities in the Indian context are likely to respond to future climatic changes.