Tanaya (she/her) is an ecologist and artist from India. She holds an MRes degree in Biodiversity, Evolution, and Conservation from University College London. She is currently an Amansa scholar at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and is reading a DPhil in Geography and Environment.
Her DPhil project measures nutrient flow across tropical forests and savannas using a whole-plant nutrient flux approach—linking nutrient content in leaves, wood, and roots with measures of plant growth. This project aims to understand how insects like termites and ants, rainfall, and soil conditions influence nutrient flows in tropical ecosystems across Africa and South Asia.
Tanaya is most herself when she is outdoors looking for plants, insects, and birds, hovering over a coral reef, or walking long distances across forests and savannas with local field teams. As a trans-disciplinarian she is actively researching and workshopping how art and science can come together through participatory interventions to roll out research more meaningfully and urgently in the world. She is an ECR representative at the BES macroecology Special Interest Group, and a founding member of the The India Tree Inventory Network (INvenTree), an early career led research network collating tree inventory datasets from disparate datasets across the country towards syntheses that will benefit ecological research and researchers.
