Mahi Puri (WEC/TCD) has been awarded the 2022 M. Schmink Outstanding Dissertation Award!

The Tropical Conservation and Development program congratulates Dr. Mahi Puri for being the 2022 recipient of the Marianne Schmink Outstanding Dissertation Award.  Dr. Puri received her PhD in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation in 2021 under the supervision of Drs. Bette Loiselle (Advisor) and Elizabeth Pienaar (Co-Advisor).  The outstanding dissertation award was established in 2010 in recognition of Dr. Marianne Schmink, former Director of the TCD Program for her significant and transformative contributions to graduate education, the Center for Latin American Studies and the TCD Program.

Dr. Puri’s dissertation entitled “Prioritizing and identifying opportunities for carnivore conservation in human-dominated landscapes of India” took an integrative, interdisciplinary approach to address key issues regarding carnivore conservation in densely populated agricultural landscapes.  Dr. Puri’s dissertation research was centered in the Pench Tiger Reserve and the large surrounding buffer area where small-scale agriculture predominates, and conflict with large vertebrates, such as tigers, leopards, sloth-bears, and several herbivores is not uncommon. Like most protected areas in India, the Pench Tiger Reserve is not sufficiently large enough to conserve these large vertebrates, and they move into surrounding human-dominated landscapes for resources. Dr. Puri’s dissertation tells an interwoven story regarding the spatial use of and temporal activity in the buffer areas by large carnivores (where, when and why), the programs and underlying factors that might motivate farmers to modify land use practices to benefit biodiversity conservation (what and why) and how one integrates carnivore ecology and farmer willingness to modify land use to prioritize sites for implementation of an incentive-based agroforestry program for conservation (where and how).