Dr Hemant Tripathi

Profile

I am a community and landscape ecologist with background in studying land use, land cover and biodiveristy change, food production-biodiversity tradeoffs, ecosystem functioning and services, and pollination ecology in socio-ecological landscapes of Southern Africa and India. 

I am currently working as a Research Fellow on the GCRF-AFRICAP project which focusses on building resilient and sustainable agricultural systems in Southern Africa. As part of this project, I investigate pest damage and control, ecosystem services and disservices, and biodiversity change in agricultural landscapes of South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi. 

Prior to moving to Leeds, I was based in Edinburgh where I worked on a range of research and consultancy projects. My assignments included analysing a large vegetation plot dataset from southern African woodlands for SEOSAW, modeling the distribution of Lilian’s’ lovebirds (Agapornis lilianae, a mopane woodland endemic) for the World Parrot Trust, and consulting on the Satellite Monitoring for Forest Management (SMFM) Project in Mozambique for the World Bank. I also worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ESPA funded Abrupt Changes in Ecosystem Services where I used biodiversity and spatial datasets for the analysis of changes in ecosystem service provisioning in African woodlands. 

I have a PhD from the Department of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, and MSc in Environmental Botany from the University of Mumbai.

My PhD under the supervision of Dr. Casey Ryan (Edinburgh) and Dr. Kate Parr (Liverpool) focused on investigating the effects of dominant land use activities- selective logging for charcoal production, agriculture expansion, and habitat disturbance by elephants - on multiple taxonomic groups – trees, mammals, birds, and ground beetles - in the savanna woodlands of Mozambique and Zambia. 

Before starting my PhD in 2013, I was based in India where one of my research projects involved studying the role of beekeeping using indigenous bee Apis cerana on crop production in the tribal farms of Northern Western Ghats (Dangs region in Gujarat). This project highlighted the positive impact of beekeeping on crop production and generation of alternative sources of income from bee wax and honey. 

Research interests

My research interests primarily comprise understanding, modeling and predicting the effects of land-use land-cover transitions on biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning and services with an objective of identifying trade-offs and, accordingly, informing land and biodiversity management. How species and functional traits at multiple scales (temporal or spatial) respond to different disturbances (land use, climate, herbivory, and others)? How their responses underpin and affect the functionality of dynamic landscapes and ecosystems? How can we conserve biodiversity and increase food production amidst the changing climate?  What are the consequences of land and climate change on biodiversity in African savanna woodlands? These questions underpin my research interests. Further, biodiversity studies are expensive and time taking. Therefore, I am also inclined towards identifying and developing cheap and rapid biodiversity survey techniques based on camera trapping, acoustic monitoring, remote sensing, and automated species identification algorithms.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Edinburgh
• MSc, University of Mumbai

Research groups and institutes

• Ecology and Evolution