Team

Principal Investigator

Robert John Chandran is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata (IISER Kolkata). Prior to joining IISER Kolkata in 2010, he served as Fellow at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore.

Robert earned a BSc in Chemistry and Biology at from Bangalore University and MSc and MTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Following that he earned a PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for his work on understanding the determinants of tree diversity in tropical dry deciduous forests of southern India. For several years during his PhD and post-doctoral stints at the University of Georgia, Athens, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he worked with a global network of tropical forest plots to understand how biotic interactions, resource competition, dispersal, and stochasticity may influence the maintenance of high species diversity in tropical forests.

At IISER Kolkata, he leads a team of researchers on ecological research at the population, community, and landscape scales, in a wide range of ecosystems. Using a combination field ecology, GIS/Remote Sensing based data, and statistical models, we investigate how species diversity is organized and maintained at multiple spatial scales, by studying patterns of plant diversity, species distributions, plant life histories, plant invasions, environmental variation, demographic processes, dispersal, succession, and community structure. Over the years we have worked on grasslands, tropical dry forests, and montane ecosystems in the Terai Duar Savanna and Grasslands, Eastern Himalaya, and central India.

Current areas of research in the lab include investigation of adaptive capacity for thermal and drought stress tolerance in central Indian tree species, drivers of land use landcover changes and vegetation transitions in central India and Terai Duar Savanna and Grasslands, and impacts of land cover changes on biodiversity and carbon cycling in multifunctional landscapes.