Kadambari Deshpande

Post-Doctoral Fellow | kadambari.deshpande at iihs dot ac dot in
Home > People  > Team > Kadambari Deshpande

EDUCATION:

2023    PhD, Conservation Science and Sustainability Studies, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the

             Environment (ATREE), Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

2009    MSc, Genomics, Centre for Excellence in Genomic Sciences, School of Biological Sciences,

             Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India

                                     2007    BSc, Zoology, Microbiology, Biochemistry, Maharani Laxmi Ammanni College for Women,

                                                  Bangalore University, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

   

Countries: India
States: Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Goa
Cities: Bengaluru, Nashik, Sirsi, Kollam, Tirunelveli
Languages: English, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil

Kadambari Vivek Deshpande is interested in studying ecosystem services of bats to people in diverse habitats, from forest-plantation mosaics to peri-urban and urban landscapes. For her PhD at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), she studied the benefits and costs of bats to people in the agroforestry landscapes of the Western Ghats. With over a decade of experience in studying bats, her research interests include bat sensory and foraging ecology and its applications in understanding habitat use by bats, spatio-temporal dynamics of bat populations, and accrual of ecosystem services from bats to people in human-modified landscapes. She also integrates local ecological knowledge in her research and regularly engages in conservation education and outreach to create scientific awareness, for bat conservation and human wellbeing.

 

At IIHS, as part of the Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory (LTUEO), at the School of Environment and Sustainability, Kadambari designs and helps execute surveys and monitoring of bat diversity and activity at the IIHS Campus, Kengeri. Through long-term studies, she plans to assess the utility and applications of bat ecosystem services as nature-based solutions. As part of this, she conducted field experiments with bat guano in the Campus, to quantify its potential as a future nature-based solution to conventional fertilisers. She will also be setting up studies on bat foraging activity and their spatial distribution using real-time acoustic monitoring methods, to quantify and assess natural insect pest control by bats in relation to conventional pesticides in agriculture.

Research Projects at IIHS

2022
Ongoing: Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory (LTUEO)

Journal Articles

  • Deshpande, K., Vanak, A. T., Devy, M. S., & Krishnaswamy, J. (2022). Forbidden fruits? Ecosystem services from seed dispersal by fruit bats in the context of latent zoonotic risk. Oikos, 2022(2), oik.08359. https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.08359
  • Deshpande, K., Kelkar, N., Krishnaswamy, J., & Sankaran, M. (2021). Stretching the habitat envelope: Insectivorous bat guilds can use rubber plantations, but need understorey vegetation and forest buffers. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2, Article 751694. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2021.751694
  • Deshpande, K., & Kelkar, N. (2019). Environmental influences on acoustic divergence in Rhinolophus bats of the Western Ghats-Sri Lanka region. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/661314
  • Kelkar, N., Dey, S., Deshpande, K., Choudhary, S. K., Dey, S., & Morisaka, T. (2018). Foraging and feeding ecology of Platanista: An integrative review. Mammal Review, 48(3), 194–208. https://doi.org/10.1111/mam.12124
  • Deshpande, K., Gangal, M. & Kelkar, N. (2016). First record of a bat from the Lakshadweep archipelago, southwestern India. Mammalia, 80(2), 223-225. https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2014-0119
  • Deshpande, K., & Kelkar, N. (2015). Acoustic identification of otomops wroughtoni and other free-tailed bat species (Chiroptera: Molossidae) from india. Acta Chiropterologica, 17(2), 419–428. https://doi.org/10.3161/15081109ACC2015.17.2.018
  • Deshpande, K., & Kelkar, N. (2015). How do fruit bat seed shadows benefit agroforestry? Insights from local perceptions in kerala, india. Biotropica, 47(6), 654–659. https://doi.org/10.1111/btp.12275
  • Soisook, P., Struebig, M. J., Noerfahmy, S., Bernard, H., Maryanto, I., Chen, S.-F., Rossiter, S. J., Kuo, H.-C., Deshpande, K., Bates, P. J. J., Sykes, D., & Miguez, R. P. (2015). Description of a new species of the rhinolophus trifoliatus -group (Chiroptera: Rhinolophidae) from southeast asia. Acta Chiropterologica, 17(1), 21–36. https://doi.org/10.3161/15081109ACC2015.17.1.002
  • Dey, S., Choudhary, S. K., Dey, S., Deshpande, K., & Kelkar, N. (2020). Identifying potential causes of fish declines through local ecological knowledge of fishers in the Ganga River, eastern Bihar, India. Fisheries Management and Ecology, 27(2), 140–154. https://doi.org/10.1111/fme.12390

 

Books/ Book Chapters

Mangrulkar, A., Bakhale, G., Krishnaswamy, J., Deshpande, K., Kulkarni, M., Khare, N. A., Jambhekar, R., Satish, R., & Atri, S.R. (2024). In A. Revi, J. Krishnaswamy, R. Mehrotra, & S. Prakash (Eds.), Natural history of IIHS campus: A future of urban biodiversity. Indian Institute for Human Settlements.

 

Other Writing

Report

 

Op-ed

 

Thesis

  • Deshpande, K. (2015). Biodiversity underpinnings of ecosystem services: A study of bats in agroforestry landscapes of India’s Western Ghats. [Doctoral thesis, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE)]. https://www.atree.org/profile/kadambari-deshpande/