ATREE

Established in 1996 in Bangalore, India, ATREE is an well known interdisciplinary, research-focused Non Governmental Organization in India, working to provide the best knowledge and data to strengthen the capacity of government and non-government organizations for biodiversity conservation. ATREE is recognized as a Centre for Excellence by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India.

With a staff of more than 120 persons located across India ATREE is ideally situated in having a well developed spatial ecology laboratory and ecoinformatics center which can facilitate data acquisition, processing and analysis of field and remotely sensed data.

Staff involved

Harini Nagendra

Harini Nagendra PhD is a landscape ecologist and land change scientist. She is a Ramanujan Fellow at ATREE and has published extensively on the integration of satellite remote sensing with biodiversity studies, examinations of land cover transitions, and forest fragmentation in protected areas and urban environments. She has worked for over 15 years on frameworks and applications to utilize satellite remote sensing for biodiversity monitoring at multiple scales, in South Asia and Latin America. Dr. Nagendra holds a number of prominent Indian and international awards

Somajita Paul MA is a Senior Research Associate and PhD. student at ATREE. She has four years of experience using satellite remote sensing to assess land cover change and landscape fragmentation using earth observation data at different spatial scales. She has conducted research on remote sensing classification techniques, landscape fragmentation studies, and forest change assessments in human impacted forest landscapes in India and Nepal, and is currently working on a PhD on studies of urban land cover changes in the Indian capital city of Delhi.

Madhura Niphadkar

Madhura Niphadkar MA is a Senior Research Associate and PhD. student at ATREE. She is a geographer with over 10 years of experience in the field of applied geospatial studies, and has worked in ecosystems as diverse as the tropical wet forestrs of the Indian Western Ghats, to the Mediterranenan shrublands of California. She is interested in Citizen Science initiatives for ecological monitoring and documentation, and has been part of a team involved in creating the India Biodiversity portal. She is currently working on her PhD which focuses on the use of earth observation data for mapping invasive species in the Indian Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot.