Kadambari Deshpande

Kadambari Deshpande is interested in studying ecosystem services from bats to people in diverse habitats, from forest-plantation mosaics to peri-urban and urban landscapes. For her PhD at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), she studied the benefits and costs from bats to people in agroforestry landscapes of the Western Ghats.

With over a decade of experience in studying bats, her research interests include bat sensory and foraging ecology, and its applications in understanding habitat use by bats, spatio-temporal dynamics of bat populations, and accrual of ecosystem services from bats to people in human-modified landscapes. She also integrates local ecological knowledge in her research and regularly engages in conservation education and outreach to create scientific awareness, for bat conservation and human wellbeing.

At IIHS, as part of the Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory (LTUEO), at the School of Environment and Sustainability, Kadambari designs and helps execute surveys and monitoring of bat diversity and activity at the IIHS Campus, Kengeri. Through long-term studies, she plans to assess the utility and applications of bat ecosystem services as nature-based solutions. As part of this, she conducted field experiments with bat guano in the Campus, to quantify its potential as a future nature-based solution to conventional fertilisers. She will also be setting up studies on bat foraging activity and their spatial distribution using real-time acoustic monitoring methods, to quantify and assess natural insect pest control by bats in relation to conventional pesticides in agriculture.