Wildlife Without Borders

Vidya Athreya has been working on the human leopard conflict issue since 2003. Working in a rural landscape on leopards was an eye opener for her, making her question (and break) a lot of her beliefs about where wildlife should be. In this talk at the Nature inFocus festival, August 2017, she discusses how adaptable wildlife needs to be to live among people in rural India.

An ecologist with a Masters degree from the University of Pondicherry and Iowa in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, she works with the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) - India program, Bangalore and is a member of the IUCN cat specialist group. She is recipient of the Kaplan Graduate award and has been extensively supported by grants from the Rufford Foundation U.K and the Royal Norwegian Embassy to India.

Her work comprises using knowledge-based interventions and working with important stakeholders so that human-leopard conflict can be reduced, especially attacks on humans. Her recent research has led to a better understanding of leopard ecology when they live among humans in agricultural landscapes. She also is very interested in the interplay between socio-politics of conflict and the role of cultural tolerance towards wildlife in India. Her work questions known paradigms of large cats living among humans. She believes that the persistence of large carnivores has much to do with the acceptance of local people towards these species.