Iravatee Majgaonkar

PhD Fellow, ATREE

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After finishing my Masters in Wildlife Biology and Conservation, I have been working in the rapidly modifying Open Ecosystems in the Deccan peninsula of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Although my work started solely with mapping carnivore distributions in these human-dominated areas, my interests have expanded to viewing Open Ecosystems as shared landscapes between people and biodiversity. My PhD training and participation in livelihood-based projects has allowed me to dabble in the social sciences and familiarised me with natural resource based livelihoods like pastoralism. For my PhD, I am studying land use change and how it impacts pastoralists and the way they share space with carnivores like wolves. In the near future, I want to continue working in Open Ecosystems and help design socially just interventions for coexistence between people and biodiversity.