Rishiraj Das
Ph.D. (Lawrence) · Ecology
Contact Information
Rishi grew up in Mumbai, India, and went to the University of California, Berkeley where he graduated with a B.S. in Ecology and Natural Resource Management. After graduating, he worked with a few different non-profit environmental groups in California and India as a researcher and project coordinator for a few years. With International Rivers, he did research on the human and ecological impacts of dams in South Asia. At the Trust for Public Land, he worked on projects that preserved over 2,500 acres of land for recreation, riparian habitat and river restoration in California’s central valley and north coast. At the Peoples’ Science Institute, he worked with scientists and engineers who assist rural communities meet their development needs through watershed development programs, post-earthquake disaster rehabilitation and monitoring environmental pollution. He worked extensively through the central Himalayas, western and central India on a variety of rural development and natural resource management projects.
Rishi returned to graduate school at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and graduated with an M.ESc. His research focused on watershed biogeochemistry, and the impacts of land use change on stream chemistry. At the University of Virginia, he is pursuing his Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences. His research is focused on nutrient cycling in tropical dry forests of the Southern Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, and the impacts of climate change and shifting cultivation. He is particularly interested in the role of the forest canopy in capturing atmospheric nutrient inputs that come from Sarahan dust or regional fires. He will be using a combination of field and labwork, remote sensing and modeling to address the long-term changes in nutrient cycling in the forests of the region.
Rishi has published journal articles on his work on forest community ecology, nutrient cycling in tropical dry forests,and on natural resource management in rural development. He has also been a contributing researcher to a book about traditional technology and water management in the Himalayas.
