Biogeography | Speciation & Diversification | Asian Tropics Evolutionary Ecology Lab 

Our research focuses on one of ecology and evolutionary biology's overarching questions: "What generates and maintains biodiversity?”. Tropical forests are storehouses of biodiversity and offer an excellent model system to address these questions. In particular, our lab aims at 1) systematic documentation of tropical diversity in an integrative taxonomic approach, 2) identifying the underlying geological, evolutionary and ecological processes that govern the diversity patterns, and 3) identifying the processes that govern the assembly of species in these forests. We draw from multiple disciplines within ecology and evolution, including biogeography, phylogenetic and population genetics, community ecology, and comparative methods. We do extensive fieldwork to build natural history collections for the unexplored taxa and landscapes of peninsular India in Tropical Asia as they form the backbone of our research. We focus on two mountain ranges: the Western Ghats, a global biodiversity hotspot, and the Eastern Ghats. More details on the past and ongoing research are here.

We are based at the Laboratory for Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONES) of CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad, India.