Dr. Priya Davidar

Priya is a retired Professor of Ecology from Pondicherry University. She has a Ph.D. in Zoology from Bombay University under the guidance of Dr. Salim Ali, and a S.M. in public health from Harvard University. She was a Post Doctoral fellow and later a Senior fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, USA. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was a faculty at Pondicherry University from 1987 to 2017 where she taught conservation biology, plant animal interactions and ornithology. Her research focus has been mainly on plant ecology, biogeography and conservation. She has studied the large-scale distribution of species across latitudinal and climatic gradients in the Western Ghats in order to understand the role of climate and habitat in limiting species distributions. She has worked on the distribution of forest birds and butterflies in the Andaman island archipelago, and trees distributions in the Western Ghats. The major findings are that climate; particularly rainfall seasonality and elevation limit tree distributions, whereas many birds and butterflies are limited by availability of habitat. She has also worked on the reproductive biology of plant species in forest fragments around the Pondicherry region. Her recent work has been on landscape ecology and genetics of Asian Elephant populations in the Western Ghats. She is actively involved in practical conservation and advocacy through networks of conservation organizations.