Scientist Spotlight
Varsha Vijay
Varsha Vijay is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis where she works on trade-offs between ecological and socio-economic conservation objectives in protected area planning.
Varsha completed her Ph.D with Saving Nature President, Stuart Pimm, on the harmful impacts of oil palm on biodiversity. She remains a close colleague and is currently working on using high resolution remote sensing to assess the success of Saving Nature’s afforestation projects.
Varsha has recently co-authored a scientific evidence paper with Paul Armsworth exploring the conflict between protected areas and agricultural practices related to the increasing human population, entitled “Pervasive cropland in protected areas highlight trade-offs between conservation and food security“.
Saving Nature recently sat down with Varsha to learn more about her research and the motivation for her work.
Why did you choose to pursue a career as a conservation ecologist?
My goal has always been to produce actionable science that helps minimize the environmental impacts of achieving societal goals. While human activities and their environmental consequences are intrinsically and clearly linked, our understanding of the natural world and of the impacts of human activities on species and habitat loss continues to evolve. Given the urgency of addressing conservation issues, my role as a conservation ecologist extends beyond publication in scientific journals to engaging a broad range of audiences and disciplines.
What would you like to achieve with your work?
My top priority is connecting my work to people’s lives and starting a longer conversation. I see science very much as a two-way street with scientists learning from the public, not just dispensing facts to them. In fact, articulating my work to the public is the best test of what I know. I have found that many of their questions are equally insightful as those from colleagues. They help me to see my work in a different perspective.
Information sharing efforts is a separate, but equally important, component of my research. I am exploring ways to effectively communicate my science and now have ideas about what will be effective. Sometimes I’m incorrect about that. By responding to feedback and altering my approach, I hope I can continue to grow as a scientist and communicator.
What are some of the impacts of agriculture on ecosystems and biodiversity?
One of the critical ways that humans shape the natural world is our increasing demand for food resources, which leads to both intensification and expansion of agriculture, both of which can impact ecosystems and biodiversity. Intensification can lead to greater impacts from pesticides and fertilizers, while expansion can cause habitat loss and increased human-wildlife conflict. Our societies must therefore weigh the environmental costs of different paths to increased food production.
What new insights have you found in your recently published paper?
Our research shows that 6% of all global terrestrial protected areas are already made up of cropland, a heavily modified habitat that is often not suitable for supporting wildlife. Worse, 22% of this cropland occurs in areas supposedly enjoying the strictest levels of protection, the keystone of global biodiversity protection efforts.
Countries with higher population density, lower income inequality, and higher agricultural suitability tend to have more cropland in their protected areas. Even though cropland in protected areas is most dominant in mid-northern latitudes, the tradeoffs between biodiversity and food security may be most acute in the tropics and subtropics. This increased tradeoff is due to higher levels of species richness coinciding with a high proportion of cropland-impacted protected areas.
What role does oil palm pay in deforestation?
One of the commodity crops of particular concern is oil palm, which grows almost exclusively in areas that were once tropical forests. These same forests are often hotspots of global importance in terms of biodiversity and ecosystem services. In partnership with the UCS Tropical Science and Carbon Initiative and other colleagues, we explored recent deforestation for oil palm plantations and identified forests vulnerable to future deforestation from oil palm expansion. We also showed that these vulnerable forests contain some of the greatest species diversity on the planet, making their loss problematic.
In that work, we found a high proportion of oil palm plantations in South America came from recent deforestation, identifying it as an emerging frontier of oil palm expansion. Our follow-up study focused on the Peruvian Amazon, an area where we saw both the greatest deforestation and increase in oil palm plantations. This new study confirmed our initial deforestation findings in more detail. It also showed key differences between oil palm and other crops grown in the region and identified a need for strengthening and expanding protections of forest areas in this region. By narrowing our focus, we were able to provide more detail on specific forest types threatened and even how past changes in policy may have changed which forests were threatened.
Today, oil palm plantation expansion continues to occur at the expense of forests not thought of as being in imminent danger of agricultural development. Though awareness is growing, it continues to be an issue with which both science and media struggle to keep up. The lessons learned from this research can be used to support increases in protected area and species threat status, in monitoring programs and voluntary market interventions.
What else are you working on?
My interests in exploring issues related to agricultural expansion has led me to explore some other topics, including working on a National Geographic funded project to assess cheetah range and population in Southern Africa. Our study showed that areas with high human and livestock density are much less likely to support cheetah populations. Where agriculture and cheetah ranges do overlap, it may result in human-wildlife conflict, resulting in the killing of cheetah in numbers that could impact the survival of local populations.
What would you like others to learn from your perspective on conservation?
I would like to make science more accessible by adding a better understanding of the methods behind the story. In discussing my research, I talk about how we conducted our research to reach the findings and conclusions.
So often in media coverage of science, the mechanics of how the science is done is missing from the story. I worry that this can feed narratives about the inaccessibility of science and misunderstandings of uncertainty as it relates to scientific findings. Depending on interest and audience, I might share photos of fieldwork, raw or processed datasets or models, visualization tools or participatory activities.
Sometimes the reaction is “Wow, that’s so interesting!”, while other times people say, “That must be a lot of (repetitive) work.” I think both reactions are accurate. Science is both a field of exciting discoveries and dogged pursuit of truth by exhaustive efforts.