Maithili Joshi is currently based in New York, pursuing her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. She works with a combination of inks, watercolour and digital mediums. Maithili draws from her personal experiences and the people she meets.

Danika Tavora is continuously awed by the transformative, expansive power that water wields on people, place & time. She feels passionately about introducing the ocean into people’s lives.

Benjamín Lagos S. is an environmental civil engineer and the Executive Director of Capital Azul.

Stefan Gelcich is the Director of the Instituto Milenio en Socio-Ecologia Costera and co-founder of Capital Azul.

Paulina Martínez M. is a community psychologist and visual artist. Using collaborative arts as community engagement tools, she is project manager at Capital Azul.

Pooja Sreenivasan is a Bangalore-based artist and illustrator. Her work captures surreal experiences of life, filled with the subtleties of emotion we feel but often forget.

Pooja Rathod is a marine biologist turned wildlife filmmaker with a deep interest in documenting natural history of all things terrestrial and aquatic.

Komal Pahwa is a visual communication designer/illustrator.
She works as a Sr. Illustrator at FCB Health, Slice It while freelancing with other clients across the world that include Breathe magazine, Focus Camera, and Lancet magazine

Jessie Davie is Maliasili’s Director of Communications & Learning. She loves making organizational development accessible and practical to best support local conservation organizations.

Shreya Yadav is a PhD candidate in marine biology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. She works in the Maldives.

Vatosoa Rakotondrazafy is a passionate advocate for small-scale fishers and has expertise in stakeholders’ engagement and mobilization. She served as the National Coordinator of MIHARI – Madagascar’s Locally Managed Marine Areas Network for 6 years and she was elected President of the board of the Network in November 2020. She won the Whitley Award in 2019 for her success in defending the rights of Madagascar’s small-scale fishers and to enable those communities to exchange experiences and strengthen their capacity to manage their resources. After successfully bringing stakeholders together to ensure the sustainable management of Madagascar’s marine resources, Vatosoa is now putting her coordination skills at the service of the Malagasy think tank INDRI with the task of building on existing conservation knowledge to safeguard Madagascar’s unique marine and terrestrial biodiversity. Vatosoa is leading the Alamino initiative – Agora of Landscapes and forests which is a national movement to generate collective action and brainpower to re-green Madagascar. In 2021, Vatosoa was recently named one of the Top 100 young African Conservation Leaders.

David Obura a Founding Director of CORDIO East Africa, is a coral reef ecologist and works on coastal sustainability in a changing world, and local to global scales.

Maya Ramaswamy is a wildlife illustrator and artist. She works for conservation, and is currently painting for her first collection of large works.

Charlotte Young is a Communications Coordinator at Blue Ventures and crafts a variety of written and digital content to advocate for the rights of small-scale fishers around the world.

Tarsh is a researcher-conservationist interested in more human inclusive models of nature conservation. He has a PhD from the British Open University, and an MSc from the University of Oxford. In addition to his affiliation with Dakshin, he is also associated with The Shola Trust and the National Centre for Biological Sciences. His area of research and intervention include work on Lantana camara – mapping it in Mudumalai, Bandipur and Wayanad, while also looking how communities can use the plant in various ways. His work also involves investigating how people and elephants share space, particularly in the Gudalur region in the Nilgiris, and finding ways to minimise negative interactions.

Kami Koyamatsu is a scientific illustrator with a passion for conservation. She is particularly fond of the night time fliers we call bats.

Sean Heighton is a PhD student at Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (France) with an interest in utilising scientific techniques to help conserve endangered species.

Philippe Gaubert is a research fellow at Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (France) with a main interest in the conservation genetics of mammals and the wildlife trade.

Chandini is an educator who tries to bring the wonder of science and nature to life for children. She lives and works at Liana Forest Farm – once an intensively farmed coconut plantation, now a conservation and education centre that is home to numerous creatures, both adopted and wild.

Anuja is a biologist interested in ecology and conservation and is especially fascinated by the complex world of ants. She loves to communicate science through her writing and currently works as the Communications Head with Ecology Research Explained (EcoRE)

András Báldi is a community and landscape ecologist at the Animal Ecology Research Group of the Hungarian AAcademy of Sciences (baldi@nhmus.hu).

Zsófia Benedek is a PhD student in ecology and evolution at the Department of Plant Taxonomy and Ecology, Eötvös University, Budapest (zsofia.benedek@gmail.com).

Ferenc Jordán is a biologist, researcher at Microsoft Research University of Trento, Centre for Computational and Systems Biology, Trento, Italy (jordan@cosbi.eu).

Jianguo (Jack) Liu is Professor at the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife and Director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA (jliu@panda.msu.edu).

Andrew Hansen is Professor and Director, Ecology Department, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana, USA (hansen@montana.edu).

Ruth DeFries is Professor at the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia University, New York, USA (rd2402@columbia.edu).

Douglas William Hume is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology/Anthropology/Philosophy, Northern Kentucky University, Kentucky, USA (humed1@nku.edu).