Our mission is to tell a story on real-world complexity in human and nature interactions through the power of modeling and data.
Our Research
As human populations expand and land-use changes accelerate, interactions between people and wildlife are becoming increasingly frequent and often contentious. Human–wildlife conflict threatens biodiversity, undermines livelihoods, and poses risks to human health and safety.
Our group studies human-wildlife conflicts in diverse social-ecological contexts, with recent projects in Guyana, Sri Lanka, India and The Gambia. In these landscapes, we investigate how agricultural expansion, forest use, and settlement patterns shape the movement of wildlife and the likelihood of encounters with people. By combining spatial modeling, ecological monitoring, and sensory ecology, we seek to uncover the mechanisms that drive conflict and to identify strategies that reduce risks for both humans and animals.
Our group develops computational models to better understand and anticipate the complex interactions between social and ecological systems. Social-ecological systems (SESs) are shaped by diverse processes—including land-use change, climate variability, biodiversity dynamics, and human behavior.
Through computational modeling, we create frameworks that integrate ecological and social data to identify feedbacks, trade-offs, and opportunities for sustainable solutions.We use spatially explicit agent-based modeling (ABM) simulations to reveal how ecological and human processes co-evolve in shared landscapes. For example, we use ABM to study SES feedbacks in the systems like snakebites in Sri Lanka and bushmeat hunting in Guyana. Similarly, in West Africa, we investigate how revegetation efforts influence not only ecological restoration but also community health outcomes.
Sensory ecology explores how organisms perceive and interact with their environment through sound, vision, and other sensory cues. Understanding these processes is key to monitoring biodiversity and predicting how species respond to rapidly changing landscapes.
Our group applies sensory ecology not only as a research theme but also as a tool for conservation and environmental monitoring. We collaborate with many researchers around the world to better use these technologies. These technologies allow us to study species that are otherwise difficult to observe, while generating large-scale datasets that reveal activity patterns, movement, and habitat use. This enables us to monitor biodiversity more efficiently and cost-effectively, particularly in remote or resource-limited settings.
Global change such as climate shifts or land-use intensification, is reshaping ecosystems. Understanding how these forces interact is central to predicting future risks and developing sustainable solutions.
Our group studies ecological systems under global change, with a focus on how climate variability and human land use jointly influence biodiversity, ecosystem services, and community well-being. Recent work includes heatwave impacts on global biodiveristy, global expansion of invasive mosquito under hotter weather, migratory timing for the birds flying between African and Europe.
Conservation faces a persistent challenge: limited resources in the face of growing ecological and social demands. Optimizing where and how to allocate land, funding, and effort is critical to achieving lasting impact.
Our group develops quantitative frameworks and decision-support tools to guide conservation planning under resource constraints. By combining spatial optimization models, ecological data, and socio-economic information, we identify strategies that maximize biodiversity protection while accounting for human needs such as food production, health, and livelihoods.
