Dr. Manish Chandi
Manish Chandi has worked in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands on the interface between communities and the natural environment. He worked with the Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team in the A&N archipelago for 25 years. His interests and work have ranged from surveys and research on salt-water crocodiles, sea turtles, forest trees, and indigenous communities, particularly of the A&N archipelago. He completed his doctoral thesis in 2016 with the Oceans and Coasts programme of the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore, where he explored the impact of the 2004 earthquake and tsunami on community-sharing mechanisms in the Nicobar Islands. His thesis broadly explored resource-sharing mechanisms and social cohesion in managing scarce resources in the Nicobar Islands. He has presented papers at international and national conferences while giving talks on his work to interested groups and communities at various forums. He currently is with the Wildlife Conservation Society of India, working on developing linkages between human communities, their rights within and around nature conservation areas and projects, as well as educative resources related to social sciences in conservation for the WCS -NCBS doctoral program in Wildlife Ecology.
Dolsy David
Dolsy David is interested in working on elephant ecology and related issues, especially in resolving human-elephant conflict and understanding coexistence in South India. She holds a master's in biodiversity (management and utilisation) from Pune University. She has experience working in the Southern Nilgiris landscape in estimating elephant occupancy and monitoring human-elephant conflict. She has worked with WCS-India (leopard research team) on and off since 2017 as a volunteer, research intern and research consultant. Her current work entails understanding the use of traditional ecological knowledge of mahouts in mitigating human-elephant conflict.