More about Yoganand

Yoganand has deep expertise in conducting biodiversity surveys, habitat assessments, studying conflict between humans and wildlife, movement ecology of large mammals, grass-grazer-predator systems, population estimation and monitoring, conservation planning of corridors, designing field ecology studies, and landscape ecology.

He is presently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for African Ecology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, conducting research on large mammal ecology in African savannas.

Previously, he was a visiting fellow at ATREE, Bangalore, and a research associate of the Smithsonian National Zoo, Washington, DC, conducting large mammal research in forest areas across India. This included assessing factors governing the distribution and abundance of the sloth bear in India, and a project on conservation planning of crucial elephant corridors in the Western Ghats.

Prior to that, he researched the behaviour and ecology of sloth bears in Panna National Park as part of Wildlife Institute of India (WII) - USFWS collaborative project. Before that, he was involved in assessing conservation status of small carnivores in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve and assessing forest bird distributions in the Andaman Islands.

Yoganand obtained fellowships and raised funds for conducting research from international and national agencies, published technical and popular-science articles, and supervised graduate student work. Was a research consultant for international conservation programs and conducted training for conservation staff in population assessment and monitoring methods.

Yoganand served as a co-chair of the Sloth Bear Expert Team of the IUCN/SSC Bear Specialist Group and in that position, identified the main conservation issues and prioritized actions for sloth bear conservation; contributed to the IUCN/SSC work including reworking the red-book listing of bears and in preparing the Global Mammal Assessment.