CIREE Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Ecology and Environment
CIREE studies India's forests, wildlife and the people who live beside them. In the field, across disciplines, for as long as it takes to understand.
Field log 001 First light
A tiger rests at the water's edge.
Around it, a web of lives we are only beginning to understand.
Our work begins where the path ends.
Chapter IAbout CIREE
The centre / Field-first / Interdisciplinary
CIREE brings ecologists, social scientists and naturalists together around one conviction: the questions that matter most for India's forests can only be answered in the field, in the company of the animals and the people who live there.
Our mission
To produce rigorous, field-grounded science that helps forests, wildlife and forest communities thrive together, and to put that science into the hands of the people who decide their future: communities, forest departments, policymakers and the public.
We start with time on the ground: walking transects at dawn, checking camera traps after the rains, sitting with farmers the morning after a crop raid. Theory follows the evidence, never the other way round.
Long-term field sites / repeated surveys
Ecology alone cannot explain why a tiger crosses a village, or why one forest recovers and another does not. We work across ecology, social science, economics and policy, because the problems do.
Ecology / sociology / geography / policy
People who live beside forests hold knowledge no instrument can record. We design research with them, share what we learn, and measure success by what changes on the ground.
Co-designed studies / results shared locally
Chapter IIResearch
Follow the tiger along the branch
Each habitat on the tiger's path is a place where we work, and a question we cannot stop asking. Together they trace a single journey: from the deep forest to the edge where people live.
Habitat 0106Evergreen understory
Counting what remains
A forest cannot be protected until it is known. We document life across taxa, from dung beetles and frogs to large carnivores, and track how communities of species shift as the landscapes around them change.
In the field: Camera traps / Acoustic monitoring / eDNA sampling / Occupancy models
Habitat 0206The living canopy
How the forest works
We study the relationships that hold a forest together: predators and their prey, fruiting trees and the birds that carry their seeds, fire, water and soil. Knowing these links tells us which ones a forest cannot afford to lose.
In the field: Long-term plots / Movement ecology / Diet analysis / Field experiments
Habitat 0306Rivers and grasslands
Seeing the whole
Forests do not end at their boundaries. Rivers, wetlands and grasslands connect them, and together they shape water, soil and climate for millions of people downstream. We study ecosystems at the scale on which they actually work.
In the field: Remote sensing / Connectivity modelling / Hydrological surveys / Ecosystem service mapping
Habitat 0406The forest edge
Sharing the land
Much of India's wildlife lives outside protected areas, on land shared with people. We investigate what allows large animals and people to share space with fewer losses on both sides, and what makes tolerance possible.
In the field: Shared-landscape surveys / Spatial risk models / Intervention trials / Interviews
Habitat 0506Forest villages
People of the forest
Millions of people depend on forests for food, fuel, income and identity. We work alongside forest-dependent communities to understand their livelihoods, rights and knowledge, and how conservation can strengthen rather than displace them.
In the field: Participatory mapping / Household surveys / Oral histories / Community monitoring
Habitat 0606Where paths cross
Conflict, tolerance and care
When an elephant raids a crop or a leopard takes a goat, the loss is real, and the response can be fatal for people and animals alike. We study these encounters closely, so that policy, compensation and early warning work for both.
In the field: Incident mapping / Early-warning pilots / Policy analysis / Narrative studies
Beyond the last habitat, the forest thins.
Forests rarely vanish overnight.
They thin. They fragment. They fall quiet.
Our science has to move faster than the loss.
About75%
of the world's wild tigers live in India.
Source: Status of Tigers, Co-predators and Prey in India, 2022
7 to 8%
of the world's recorded species live in India, on just 2.4% of its land.
Source: Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change
4 of 36
of the world's biodiversity hotspots extend into India.
Source: Conservation International
About275 million
rural people in India depend on forests for subsistence and livelihoods.
Source: World Bank, 2006
Chapter IIIOutreach
Papers / field notes / articles / briefs
Our work does not end in a journal. Papers, field notes, science articles and policy briefs carry what we learn to the people who can act on it: fellow researchers, forest departments, funders, students and the communities we work with.
M. Raghavan, K. Nair, A. Bhattacharya
Four years of camera-trap data from protected and unprotected forest show how prey density and human activity together decide where tigers move, and why the land between reserves matters as much as the reserves themselves.
K. Nair
Dung beetles are among the first animals to vanish when large mammals go. A season of surveys along a disturbance gradient turned an overlooked insect into one of our most sensitive measures of forest health.
A forest can look whole from above and be empty within.
K. Nair, R. Deshmukh
Recorders hidden in the canopy capture frogs, owls, insects and the alarm calls of deer. This is how thousands of hours of sound become a picture of who lives where, and who has gone quiet.
A. Bhattacharya, F. Siddiqui
Delays and paperwork leave many farmers without support after crop losses. Drawing on interviews across affected villages, we set out practical changes that would make compensation faster and fairer.
R. Deshmukh, M. Raghavan
As hornbills and other large fruit-eating birds decline, the trees that depend on them stop spreading. We map which plant species are most at risk of losing their dispersers, and what that means for the canopy of the future.
T. Lepcha
Three months of conversations about rain, firewood, forest rights and wild boar: notes from the season when a forest and its people live closest together.
Coexistence is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of tolerance, and of support for those who bear the cost.
M. Raghavan
A corridor only works if animals actually use it and people can live beside it. What we learned from following wildlife movement through a fragmented landscape.
F. Siddiqui, A. Bhattacharya
Interviews with three generations of farming families reveal how memories of loss, changing livelihoods and local stories shape whether people will share their land with leopards and tigers.
Chapter IVTeam and opportunities
Field researchers / students / collaborators
We are a small team. Most days you will find us somewhere between a forest trail and a village tea stall, listening more than we talk.
Survey walk forest edge, late light
The crew
Director and carnivore ecologist
Western Ghats
Tigers, leopards and the prey that sustains them
The tiger is the headline. The story is everything it depends on.
Senior scientist, coexistence
Central India
How farmers and elephants share one landscape
Every conflict map is also a map of people's patience.
Research associate, biodiversity
Kerala
Camera-trap and acoustic surveys
Some mornings I check the camera traps. Some mornings a leopard has checked them first.
Field coordinator
Eastern Himalaya
Community monitoring and local partnerships
Nobody reads a forest like the people who walk it every day.
Social scientist
Delhi and the field
Forest rights, livelihoods and policy
Conservation that ignores people does not last.
Doctoral researcher
Maharashtra
Hornbills, fruiting trees and seed dispersal
Follow the hornbills and you find out where the forest is going.
Work with us
We look for curious, patient people who are comfortable with uncertainty, mud and long silences. If nothing here fits, write to us anyway.
Lead fieldwork on crop and livestock losses in villages bordering a tiger reserve, combining household surveys with spatial data. Suited to a postgraduate in ecology, geography or the social sciences who is at home in the field.
Set and maintain camera traps, manage image data and work closely with local forest staff and trackers. Field experience helps; patience and curiosity are essential.
For students and recent graduates who want hands-on experience in ecological or social research. Interns join a live project and leave with real data, a mentor and a story worth telling.
Help turn our research into field notes, illustrations, translations and talks for schools and forest communities.
Chapter V Support CIREE
Your support keeps researchers in the field, camera traps running through the monsoon and long-term studies alive long enough to matter. It funds the slow work of building trust with forest communities, without which coexistence is only a word.