A dehisced fruit, held up by Dr. T R Shankar Raman (Scientist, NCF), its star-shaped form a glimpse into the forest's complexity.

Understory

Shared infrastructure for ecological intelligence

A conservation program, built from the ground up with restoration practitioners i.e. indigenous and local communities, researchers, institutions, alongside technologists and funders. Together, we are designing open tools for complex ecosystems: modular, memory-aware, and made for commons.

Emerging from place-based conservation challenges in biodiverse, climate-vulnerable regions such as the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve (NBR), the coalition is not geographically bound. We collaborate across regions to co-create interoperable tools, shared data standards, and collective learning frameworks that can travel i.e. adapting to local ecological and social contexts without flattening their specificity.

The terrain

While there are many entry points into restoration, meaningful ecological recovery in the NBR and Western Ghats cannot occur without addressing IAP i.e. invasive alien plant species. Lantana camara alone blankets over 1.8 lakh hectares in Tamil Nadu. Alongside Senna spectabilis and Chromolaena odorata, these invasives choke native vegetation, alter fire regimes, starve wildlife, reduce community access to forest produce, and burden departments with spiraling removal costs.

Yet across the landscape, removal—often undertaken in good faith and at great expense—frequently leads to relapse as planning follows action, replanting is delayed and monitoring remains patchy.

Landscapes are being mapped, both undisturbed benchmark sites and heavily altered ecosystems, however restoration efforts are unfolding along parallel tracks.

Some groups focus on invasive removal; others study how invasives interact with native species or human settlements. In parallel, technologists attempt to intervene by mapping landscape-specific natives, scaling nurseries, and developing replantation protocols for forest restoration.

Yet these efforts rarely converge. Data generated at one stage seldom informs decisions at the next; sequencing is fragmented; and interventions are designed in isolation from long-term monitoring, local livelihoods, or landscape memory. The result is well-intentioned work that remains partial, its impact constrained by the absence of shared frameworks, interoperable data, and coordinated planning across the restoration lifecycle.

Our programs working hypothesis is restoration falters not due to insufficient effort but because critical pieces are missing from the systems that guide that effort.

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The people behind this effort

Rinju Rajan

Bridges ecology & technology

She leads on funding and conservation knowledge, ensuring our tools are rooted in real-world needs. A believer in inclusive tech, Rinju connects impact with investment; and instincts with ecosystems. A keen birder, she’s most at home in the forest, where every sound sharpens her senses and her binoculars feels like an extension of herself.

Prashanth Balasubramanian

Turns tangled ideas into tools that work

The calm behind our engineering, he turns ambitious ideas into intuitive tools. With a patient eye for detail and a taste for bear-themed code names, Prashanth blends big-picture thinking with elegant problem-solving. Just don’t take his coffee-or his dreams of a crocodile park-lightly.

Vidya Sridhar

Translates terrain into insight

She brings a quiet clarity to community engagement, translating complex data into actionable insights. With a knack for spotting patterns others miss, Vidya ensures our work stays grounded in frontline realities. In the forest, she reads the terrain like a story, unshaken even when “venomous snake” is mentioned mid-sentence.

Anusha Meher Bhargava

Holds the vision and the rhythm

She anchors the program, weaving strategy, storytelling, and operations into a cohesive whole. Her energy is matched by a deep attentiveness to detail and design. In the jungle, she sprawls across muddy trails like they’re home, collecting stories, swatting leeches; aligning the wild with the possible.

She is also one of the first-ever Big Bets Fellows for the Asia-Pacific by The Rockefeller Foundation.

T.R. Shankar Raman

Weaves ecology, wild and conservation into practice

Writer, scientist and back to writer, Shankar studies forests, birds and mammals at Nature Conservation Foundation, turning field observations into stories that bring the Western Ghats to life.

Anita Varghese

Anchors community wisdom in restoration

Rooted in the Blue Mountains, Anita believes forests cannot be understood in isolation from the communities that live with them. Discerning and patient, she deciphers the mysteries of invasives at Keystone Foundation, guiding us toward practices that belong equally to nature and people.

Jagdeesh Rao Puppala

Exemplifies the spirit of the commons

Jagdeesh is a veteran and OG of forests, rivers and the commons. As CEO of Living Landscapes and ex-ED of FES, he mixes local knowledge, science and a dash of street-smarts to bridge landscapes and communities.

Tanya Kak

Bridges communities and climate adaptation

Tanya moves at the intersection of climate, development and community. A strong proponent of shared wisdom and resilient approaches to climate action, she engages thoughtfully with partners at Rohini Nilekani Philantropies, bringing a systemic lens to development issues.

Srinivasan K

Communicates what works within the forests

Srini is a meticulous coordinator and patient explainer with deep practical knowledge about forests and plant ecology at Nature Conservation Foundation. He braves leech infested thickets to retrieve photographs, tag trees and record phenology patterns.

Harshavardhini Angappan

Transforms biodiversity assessments into action

Quick, sharp and action oriented restoration practitioner, who has learnt the forest footprints of Kotagiri. Harsha makes sense of restoration data and coordinates between field and office teams, but more importantly maintains better relationships with them.

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Bharath M Palavalli

Unifies on-ground efforts through better data

Fluent in the language of data, public policy, participatory action and a believer of building shared infrastructure. At Tarkam, Bharath ensures today’s data systems speak to one another, so that insights are richer and can be shared across landscapes.

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Sanvi Sharma

Reads and writes code like poetry

A thoughtful engineer, a clear communicator and a relentless tinkerer. Drawn to open-source ways, she shows up at FOSS events and brings that philosophy into building technology for conservation.

Tanya Kak, Associate Director & Head, Climate & Environment at Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, offers a glimpse into the thinking and intent behind this program

The social sector’s strength depends on how well its systems talk to one another. When data connects and platforms interlink, progress stops being isolated and starts becoming shared. We’ll explore what that shift looks like in practice: from isolated innovation to shared infrastructure, from standalone pilots to connected ecosystems and from vendor-owned to community-owned.

Alignment across three fronts

The Restoration Pipeline

We look at ecological restoration as a continuous pipeline, ensuring invasive detection flows into removal, planning, execution, monitoring, assessment, and advocacy, rather than a stop & start cycle of fragmented interventions.

Integrating the restoration pipeline with technology (where relevant), can magnify ecological recovery compared to isolated restoration efforts. Feedback loops emerge, where removal timelines inform nursery readiness, and growth patterns refine monitoring frameworks.

People in the System

The tools and models are built alongside people immersed in field restoration, anchored in their expertise to shape each component of the system.

By aligning these actors across the restoration pipeline through shared protocols, datasets, and frameworks, their distinct capabilities travel across sites, and uneven expertise and efforts across different restoration stages is stabilised to strengthen on-ground action.

Accumulating Ecological Knowledge

When experiment datasets across organisations are connected and insights are accumulated, ecological understanding improves. Within organisations and programs, we help partners rewire their own data practices where restoration experiments, community initiatives, and governance work can share common identifiers, schemas, and memory, allowing insights to accumulate rather than remain siloed.

At the Keystone Campus observing how native species from various parts of Nilgiris are grown are cared for in their conservatory and nursery.

Prashanth and Srini discuss features that could support field needs-
thinking through what matters, and what’s useful on the ground

New features are tested at an NCF long-term monitoring site-
refining tools in the places they’re meant to serve.

The team, in Wayanad, studying tree canopies and cover,
exploring if drone capture can help trace the spread of invasives

The Prototypes

What is emerging through the coalition is a working suite that mirrors how restoration actually unfolds in the field. Conservation rarely begins with neat datasets. We have scattered observations, photographs taken at fixed points, paper forms filled out under difficult conditions, and long walks across transects and plots. The effort here has been to bring these fragments into alignment so that they begin to speak to each other.

A mobile app for field teams to capture restoration progress through visual, time-series monitoring.

The process starts with field capture. Teams document restoration sites through structured photo monitoring and simple paper forms that record observations across different plots and transects. These inputs track ecological indicators such as species presence, disturbances, and landscape change. The system is designed to work under real field conditions, which means mobile applications function offline and allow teams to systematically capture photographs and notes even in remote landscapes.

Data forms are automatically digitised by uploading a photo of the sheet, eliminating manual data entry. The system extracts table and field data, while allowing human corrections that progressively improve detection and contextual accuracy.

Paper remains an important part of the workflow. Many teams continue to rely on handwritten forms during field surveys. The platform therefore includes a mechanism to upload paper forms and automatically detect fields, titles, and handwritten entries.

These can then be edited and corrected so that variations in handwriting do not compromise the analysis. The intention is not to replace field practices but to translate them into usable datasets without adding unnecessary friction.

Once captured, these different streams of information begin to move through the system. Data collected from monitoring plots feeds into planning processes, particularly for nurseries and restoration interventions. At the same time, models such as Alienwise analyse invasive species presence and forecast potential spread across landscapes. Instead of working in isolation, field observations and modelling outputs inform one another, allowing restoration teams to interpret what is happening on the ground with greater clarity.

Alienwise, a tool under development to understand interactions between different invasive species, spot degradation corridors that are often inaccessible by foot for invasive detection to guide restoration teams.

The experiment builder enables researchers and program coordinators to map the structure of sampling sites and transect blocks. The system parses experiment protocol documents and KML files to infer and reconstruct field and block configurations.

Additional signals enter the system through sensors and guided field confirmations. These help identify disturbances & ecological disruptions. When these signals are combined with field observations and model outputs, they create a more layered understanding of how landscapes are changing.

This intelligence then feeds directly into decision making. It helps determine which species should be prioritised, how nurseries should plan their stock, and where interventions should take place. The same system also supports the design of experiments and restoration protocols, allowing researchers to test different approaches while maintaining consistent documentation across sites. Spatial protocols can be visualised through KML layers, helping teams map interventions and monitoring locations.

A visual time-lapse of ecological recovery: photos captured from a fixed station over time show canopy closure and the emergence of native saplings in the understory. Assisted by natural language querying for quicker analysis.

Planting and intervention tracking are supported through dedicated tools such as NCF’s Plantwise, which connect nursery planning with field implementation. Monitoring does not end after planting. The system continues to track visual and ecological indicators over time, helping teams understand whether restoration strategies are working.

Back in the office, desktop applications allow researchers, analysts, and field teams to review the information gathered in the field. They can analyse visual changes over time through photo monitoring, query survey responses and observation notes, and examine site-specific questions that emerge from the data. Tools such as the Indicator Wizard not only help standardise field data but also help translate raw field observations into meaningful ecological indicators that can guide the next cycle of monitoring.

Taken together, the suite forms a reinforcement loop. Field observations inform models and planning. Planning guides interventions. Interventions are monitored again through structured documentation in the field. Over time, the system accumulates both ecological knowledge and operational learning, helping restoration efforts move from isolated projects to coordinated, data-informed landscape recovery.

What potential does this hold for the sector?

This lays the groundwork for a shared conservation intelligence infrastructure.

A system that could allow:

Restoration ecologists across geographies to compare regeneration timelines
Forest department & Self Help Groups to forecast invasive spread and plan interventions proactively
Researchers to layer phenology, biomass, and biodiversity records into a single ecological timeline
Funders and policymakers to see conservation not as anecdote, but as evidence