More about Abi Tamim

Abi's conservation work started in the early 1990's as volunteer on the beaches of Chennai with the Student's Sea Turtle Conservation Network (SSTCN). Most of his current work focuses on the ecology and conservation of India's semi-arid savanna grasslands and its unique set of endemic and endangered fauna. He is also on the forefront of research in examining how a diverse assemblage of large herbivores and carnivores survive in human-dominated landscapes, especially given the huge pressures from rapidly changing agricultural and social tolerance landscapes. An important and pioneering aspect of this research examines competition between wild carnivores and domestic dogs. Abi is well published in the top journals in the field of ecology and conservation as well as being on the editorial board of two of the top conservation journals.

He holds a Bachelors degree in zoology from the Loyola College, Chennai, a Masters degree in wildlife science from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun and Ph.D. In wildlife science from the University of Missouri, Columbia and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.

In 2012 he was awarded one of the first National Environment Sciences Fellowships from the Ministry of Environment and Forests, which he is using to map the last of the semi-arid savanna grasslands of peninsular India. He is currently a faculty at the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, Bangalore.