Vidya Athreya
Research Associate, Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) - India program, BangaloreVidya is an ecologist working for the last 8 years on interactions between a large cat (the leopard) and humans when they share the same space. She is interested in understanding the drivers of man-animal conflict in the backdrop of the socio-cultural ethos in India which inspires tolerance for other life forms.
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Vidya Athreya is an ecologist who has been working on the human leopard conflict issue since 2003. She has a Masters degree from University of Pondicherry and Iowa in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She is currently with Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) - India program, Bangalore. 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 has been essentially to work with the local Forest Department officials so that human leopard conflict can be reduced, especially attacks on humans. She is also a member of the IUCN cat specialist group.Her recent research work 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 also questions known paradigms of large cats living among humans and she believes that persistence of large carnivores has a lot to do with the acceptance of local people towards these species. She has written extensively on this issue and all the material is online at www.projectwaghoba.in
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