We have made a conservation film "Bastion of the Giants" that looks at the picturesque, unique and bio-diverse wetland wildlife habitats of North Eastern India fed by the mighty river Brahmaputra and its tributaries and supporting a tremendous wealth of flora and fauna, among them the Asian Elephant; a flagship species that needs large areas to roam in, thus ensuring protection of large forest areas, but also leading to man-animal conflicts as a large portion of the world's exploding human population lives around these ancient elephant forests, rapidly converting these forests into human use. The film has already won prestigious International Awards like the "Isla Earth Conservancy Award of Merit" by the Catalina Island Conservancy off Los Angeles, "The Best Nature Film Award" at The Barents Ecology film Festival 2016, Russia, "The Best Feature Film of 2015" at the Wildlife Conservation Film Festival at New York, "The Audience Award for Best Conservation Film" at the Catalina Film Festival, 2016, off Los Angeles, apart from being a Finalist for the "WWF Malaysia Award 2015" at the Kuala Lampur Eco Festival, the official selection at France's prestigious "Festival international du film Ornithologique de Ménigoute" and Official Selection and screened/being screened at over 15 international film festival across the world including Germany, Finland, Russia, France, Malaysia, USA, Hungary, Estonia, Canada. Some of the festivals being Matsalu Nature Film Festival-Estonia, Wild Vaasa Film Festival-Finland, Naturvision Film Festival-Germany, Kala Ghoda Film Festival-Mumbai, Godollo International Nature Film Festival-Hungary, Columbia Gorge Film Festival-USA, Cinema on the Bayou Film festival,-Louisiana, USA, Awareness Film Festival-Los Angeles,Bushwick Film Festival-New York, Muskoka Film Festival-Ontario, Canada, Lake Erie Arts and Film Festival.

Kin selection theory has enjoyed much success with its original problems like the evolution of the eusocial insects, but it has also predicted many new phenomena. I highlight three recent examples from our lab (1) The slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum cooperates with kin but also recognizes non-kin and expresses conflict genes that evolve rapidly. (2) In the seeds of flowering plants, conflict between the mother, endosperm, and embryo generates evolutionary arms races. (3) Honeybee workers are pushed by their paternally imprinted genes to lay eggs. In the last part of the talk I argue that similarly fruitful theory may be available for interactions between species, because they can be understood in terms closely parallel to Hamilton’s kin selection rule.

Spoken language as well as music are considered uniquely human traits but
share a number of striking parallels with birdsong. Comparing the
biologically tractable cognitive abilities necessary for language, music
and birdsong is a fruitful endeavor to identify which properties are shared
and which are unique to each. I will start with an attempt to disambiguate
and operationally define different key aspects of language, music and
birdsong, addressing structural and functional aspects. I will then review
some of our recent behavioural data on rhythm, ‘syntax’ and multimodal
communication in songbirds. I will end by briefly highlighting the neural
and molecular similarities underlying human speech and birdsong, including
our findings on the relevance of the FoxP2 gene for both.

Allan Octavian Hume, known for founding the Indian National Congress, is a major figure in Indian ornithology. He privately built up one of the largest collections of bird specimens from the Indian Subcontinent and founded Stray Feather, the first regional ornithology journal. His vast collection was gifted to the then British Museum (the natural history section is now the Natural History Museum) and are overseen by Dr Prys-Jones and his colleagues at Tring.
A recent biographical note on Hume by the speaker can be found here
http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/cns26/njc/Papers/Collar%2520%26%2520Prys-Jone...
Also see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Octavian_Hume

we have made a conservation film “Bastion of the Giants” .that looks at the picturesque, unique and bio-diverse wetland wildlife habitats of North Eastern India fed by the mighty river Brahmaputra and its tributaries and supporting a tremendous wealth of flora and fauna, among them the Asian Elephant; a flagship species that needs large areas to roam in, thus ensuring protection of large forest areas, but also leading to man-animal conflicts as a large portion of the world’s exploding human population lives around these ancient elephant forests, rapidly converting these forests into human use.

The film has already won prestigious International Awards like the “Isla Earth Conservancy Award of Merit” by the Catalina Island Conservancy off Los Angeles, “The Best Nature Film Award” at The Barents Ecology film Festival 2016, Russia, “The Best Feature Film of 2015” at the Wildlife Conservation Film Festival at New York, “The Audience Award for Best Conservation Film” at the Catalina Film Festival, 2016, off Los Angeles, apart from being a Finalist for the “WWF Malaysia Award 2015” at the Kuala Lumpur Eco Festival, the official selection at France’s prestigious “Festival international du film Ornithologique de Ménigoute” and Official Selection and screened/being screened at over 15 international film festival across the world including Germany, Finland, Russia, France, Malaysia, USA, Hungary, Estonia, Canada. Some of the festivals being Matsalu Nature Film Festival-Estonia, Wild Vaasa Film Festival-Finland, Naturvision Film Festival-Germany, Kala Ghoda Film Festival-Mumbai, Godollo International Nature Film Festival-Hungary, Columbia Gorge Film Festival-USA, Cinema on the Bayou Film festival,-Louisiana, USA, Awareness Film Festival-Los Angeles, Bushwick Film Festival-New York, Muskoka Film Festiva-Ontario, Canada, Lake ErieArts and Film Festival.

Please do find the official trailer link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klMl81BQ9sg

Abstract:
How forests respond to anthropogenic climate change raises challenging
questions that are both fundamental and urgent. Vulnerability of forest to
changing rainfall patterns and increasing extreme events such as droughts
is clear from wide-spread tree mortality and can have large scale consequences
on forest diversity, services and global climate sysetm. However, underlining
processes such as
how meteorological drought translates into tree mortality, species-specific
vulnerability are unclear.

This thesis begins with addressing some perplexing issues in assessing
forest tree growth response vis-à-vis rainfall gradients, both in space and time.
It then addresses some fundamental questions as to where do trees source water from,
and what is the dynamics of water availability by depth that species actually
respond to
in terms of growth and survival. It employs a novel method to assess species-specific
water uptake in a forest over two decades and evaluates how belowground
“hydrological niches”
operate for these long-lived organisms that are trees; assisting their co-existence,
but
leading to differential fates under extreme drought.

Insects have for millennia presented human society with some of its greatest development challenges by spreading diseases, consuming crops and damaging infrastructure. Despite the massive human and financial toll of invasive insects, cost estimates of their impacts remain sporadic, spatially incomplete and of questionable quality. We compiled the most comprehensive database of economic costs of invasive insects, expressing historical estimates in annual 2014-equivalent US dollars. Taking all reported goods and services estimates, invasive insects cost a minimum of US$70.0 billion year-1 globally, while global health costs directly attributable to invasive insects exceed US$6.9 billion year-1. Total costs rise as the number of estimates increases, although many of the worst costs have already been estimated (especially those related to human health). A lack of dedicated studies, especially for reproducible goods and services estimates, implies gross underestimation of global costs. Global warming as a consequence of climate change, rising human population densities and intensifying international trade will allow the costliest insects to spread into new areas, although substantial savings could be achieved by increasing surveillance, containment and public awareness.

Understanding the processes that influence spatial patterns in species richness and composition is central to ecology. A wide range of mechanisms have been proposed but the struggle to find a universal explanation for these patterns continues. The wet evergreen forests of the Western Ghats provide an ideal setting to test the drivers of large scale variation in species richness. We collected primary data comprising 20,400 occurrences of 450 species of woody plants, and built a biome-wide species database, to examine patterns of richness and composition along the entire latitudinal extent of the Western Ghats. This study uses a macroecological approach with a focus on species geographic range to uncover the mechanisms that shape the diversity and distribution of woody plants in the Western Ghats. We then use spatial, edaphic, topographic and climatic variables to test the relative importance of niche based and dispersal based processes in structuring spatial variation in species composition. Finally, using the primary data collected on species occurrence and range size, we establish for the first time, baseline data on the status and distribution of woody plants and, following the IUCN criteria, carry out
species assessments for 250 species of endemic woody plants of the Western
Ghats.

Acoustic communication in orthopterans and anurans is a suitable model system to study sexual selection because the acoustic signals are generally produced by males to attract females over long distances for mating. Such systems provide an opportunity to explore the two operative mechanisms of sexual selection, male competition and female mate choice. In studies of sexual selection in these systems, the common approach has been to quantify male acoustic signal variation and to measure female preferences for different features of the acoustic signal using playback experiments, generally under laboratory conditions. A lack of ecologically relevant information on signal variation and female mate sampling strategies in wild populations, however, makes it difficult to assess the strength of selection and distinguish between the two mechanisms of sexual selection. Thus, for my thesis, I first quantified variation in male acoustic signals in a wild population of the field cricket species Plebeiogryllus guttiventris, in terms of amount of calling activity across multiple nights and the acoustic features of the advertisement signal within and across nights. I then went on to study female preferences for individual call features and the possible trade-offs when features co-varied. Finally, I explored female sampling strategies using experimental and computational approaches.

Collective behavior is a phenomena present ubiquitously in biological systems. Collectively moving animals show complex patterns and dynamics. The behavior leading to such patterns could confer evolutionary advantage to animals. Therefore, it is important to study how such patterns are formed and what function they provide to an animal. This has been a subject of many theoretical and empirical studies. Theoretical models have shown that a mobile group self-organizes by virtue of simple local interactions among near-neighbors. These models are constructed based on theoretical insights (sometimes intuitive) of mechanistic processes underlying these patterns. However, many of the model assumptions may not hold true in reality. Moreover, the nature of these findings has largely remained qualitative. Therefore, in our work, we wish to derive a mathematical model using empirical data that can provide a quantitative framework for understanding the scales of interaction in a mobile group.
Broadly, this thesis aims to provide a quantitative framework of the mechanistic drivers of collective motion and ecological conditions under which such behavior evolves.
In the first objective, we model a group level property (average orientation) that describes the state of the system. We derive a stochastic ordinary differential equation model by applying a coarse grained approach to real data from fish schools. The model predicts a change in the group level property as a function of group size. Future work involves making a general model applicable over a range of group sizes.
In the second objective, we aim to understand dynamics over smaller spatial scale within the group. Therefore, we will monitor a local level property of the group that varies both across space and time. Using this data we will derive a stochastic partial differential equation that can describe the spatio-temporal evolution of the locally varying property within the group.
In the third objective, we aim to decipher interaction rules between individuals using an evolutionary approach. Our premise is that those set of rules that result in the system showing an expected state, might also be the rules operational in real world systems. Therefore, we will explore different situations leading to the evolution of the system to an expected state. This thesis thus uses multiple approaches to investigate the mechanisms driving collective motion in animals.