Tanaya Nair

Towards a Whole-Plant Understanding of Nutrient Cycling in Tropical Forests and Savannas: Insights from Africa and India

Tanaya (she/her) is an ecologist and artist from India. Her research interests in biodiversity resilience and nature recovery expand across scales and biomes. She holds an MRes degree in Biodiversity, Evolution, and Conservation from University College London. She is a visiting researcher at the Archibald Ecology lab in University of Witwatersrand, South Africa where she is using microclimate models to determine frost as a driver of vegetation structure in the Miombo woodland grassland mosaics of Southern Africa. She is an Amansa scholar at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and is reading a DPhil in Geography and Environment at University of Oxford. 

Her DPhil project investigates how plants manage nutrients across tropical forests and savannas using a whole-plant nutrient flux approach—linking nutrient content in leaves, wood, and roots with measures of plant growth. This project aims to understand how insects like termites and ants, rainfall, and soil conditions influence nutrient flows in tropical ecosystems across Africa and South Asia.

Tanaya is most herself when she is outdoors looking for birds and plants, hovering over a coral reef with a magnifying glass, or walking long distances across forests and grasslands. She is actively researching and workshopping how art and science can come together through participatory interventions to roll out research more meaningfully and urgently in the world. She is an ECR representative at the BES macroecology Special Interest Group, a member of the Biodiversity Collaborative in India, where she contributes to assessment reports for policy makers, and a member of the The India Tree Inventory Network (INvenTree), a group of early career researchers in India collating tree inventory datasets from disparate datasets across the country towards syntheses that will benefit ecological research and researchers.

Links to recent work

• Manuscript: Prioritizing landscapes to reconcile biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and human well-being in India. (Nature Sustainability 2023)
• Pre-print: Harmonising distributed tree inventory datasets across India can fill critical gaps in tropical ecology (BioRXiv 2024)
• Policy Report: Restoring India’s Terrestrial Ecosystems: Needs, Challenges and Policy Recommendations (Published open access on Zenodo)