Data stories, maps and dashboards built from long-term field records: camera traps, radio collars, bird counts and monthly tree surveys. Each one takes years of patient fieldwork and turns it into something anyone can explore, from the rainforests of the Western Ghats to the ravines of the Chambal.
The Anamalai Hills and the Valparai plateau: a mosaic of rainforest remnants, tea and coffee, and the elephants that move between them. Further north, the coffee country of Hassan.
For nine years a small team walked the same forest trails every month and scored the leaves, flowers and fruit of 57 tree species: 120,468 observations. Together they show a forest that runs on a schedule, feeds its animals on a calendar, and is beginning to slip.
Twenty years of point counts across 19 rainforest fragments: which birds rose, which declined, and what fragmentation did to forest specialists and endemics.
15,181 tracking detections and 971 conflict incidents across 12 herds and individuals. Filter by herd, season, habitat and time of day, or replay a decade of movement.
53,596 radio-collar fixes from Hassan's elephants, including the Beetamma herds, Bhuvaneshwari and Old Belt, replayed on a timeline across the coffee landscape.
A young tiger reserve read through half a million camera-trap frames, and the gharials of the Chambal followed by radio tag.
466,520 camera-trap images from 203 locations, run through MegaDetector and SpeciesNet: activity patterns, hotspots, occupancy, individual big cats and human pressure across the reserve.
Five radio-tagged gharials followed along the Chambal: movement, hotspots, seasonal shifts, home ranges measured in river-kilometres, and water temperature.
The same methods, applied to an extraordinary personal record from an English river.
2,271 visits in seven years, nine days in ten. Effort-corrected trends for 93 bird species, migrants arriving earlier, 49,000 birds passing overhead, and what happened to the wetland birds when the beavers came.
Websites built for conservation projects, and the communities that share India's wildlife.
Safeguarding gharials to save the Chambal: the project's research, conservation work, team and reports in one place.
A foundation and community platform for stories on India's wildlife, conservation, travel and nature photography.
India's non-commercial nature photography community: more than 652,000 images from over 10,000 contributors across two decades.
Kalyan Varma is an Emmy-nominated Indian wildlife filmmaker and photographer. A software engineer by training, he left technology in 2004 for the forests of the Biligiriranga Hills, and has since worked as a cinematographer and director with the BBC Natural History Unit, Netflix, National Geographic, Discovery and Disney+, on productions including Our Planet, Life Story, Big Cats and Secrets of the Elephants.
His film Wild Karnataka, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, was the first Indian wildlife film released in cinemas and won the National Film Award in 2021. He co-founded India Nature Watch and Nature inFocus, built on an open-source belief that knowledge about nature should be shared freely. This site carries that idea into data: long-term field records, opened up so anyone can explore them.