Senior Nature Educator
Specialty: Plant Ecology · Plant–Animal Interactions · Avian Frugivory · Urban Ecology
About Aditya Gadkari: Ecologist & Educator
Aditya Gadkari is a wildlife biologist by training and an ecologist and educator by practice — and few naturalists in the country carry a résumé quite as broad. With more than a decade in the field and 3,000+ hours across the Western Ghats, Himalaya, Northeast India, the Andaman Islands and beyond, he moves as easily through a rocky plateau’s flora as he does through a coral reef.
His credentials read like a conservation-science greatest hits: an IUCN Red List Assessor and a member of the IUCN SSC Western Ghats Plant Specialist Group, a PADI Advanced Open Water diver, and a published researcher whose work on avian frugivory and plant–frugivore interaction networks has appeared in journals including Proceedings of the Royal Society B. He has led leopard population estimations in Mumbai, red-list assessments for endemic plants of the northern Western Ghats, and avian frugivory research in the Andamans, with past roles at the Nature Conservation Foundation, BNHS and Sanjay Gandhi National Park.
Aditya Gadkari’s Unforgettable Falcon Moment
One March afternoon while sampling plants on a rocky cliff near Rajgad Fort — the temperature nudging 35°C and the heat getting the best of him — Aditya glanced up at a raptor circling overhead. Through his binoculars, a majestic Peregrine Falcon began to circle, then took a straight dive into the valley below, disappearing within seconds. Having seen everything from the smallest insects to the largest mammals, he still counts it among his most memorable encounters.
For all his technical depth, Aditya’s philosophy is disarmingly simple, and it’s the heart of how he teaches: always question everything. The more you question, the more you think — and the more things slip out of the standard narrative, revealing the nuance in all things.
“What’s important is that in the race to name species, we don’t forget the habitats they live in. — Dr. Uma Ramakrishnan”
