M. Soubadra Devy, with nearly three decades of experience as an ecologist and teacher, currently serves as an Adjunct Fellow at ATREE. She started her career studying biodiversity and species interactions in the tall canopies of wet evergreen forests of the Southern Western Ghats. This pioneering effort won her the Lowell Thomas Award for outstanding exploration from the Rolex-Explorers’ Club in 2006.

Later, recognising that critical conservation issues lie outside protected areas, she, along with her students, initiated work on the sustenance of biodiversity and pollination services in `nature and agriculture’ coupled systems in human-dominated spaces ranging from tea-forest scapes, orange-forest fragments, Chayote squash-urban national park, to urban agriculture.

Her interdisciplinary approach to research involves collaborations with economists, sociologists and community leaders. Currently, her research focuses on reimagining green spaces in cities to foster pollinators and biodiversity. Her recent interest is in the eco-restoration of lake shores and riparian vegetation of rivers, recognising that these are important zones that serve as biodiversity refugia. Restoring them is as important as improving water quality, particularly in a human-dominated matrix.