My research aim to understand why species live where they do and how this is changing in the Anthropocene. I am broadly interested in biogeography, mixed-flocks and community ecology — especially as they apply to birds in montane ecosystems.

Here are some of the projects I have worked on:

Bird-bamboo associations

Bamboo is species-rich and extensive, especially in Asian forests like the Himalaya. However, it is vastly understudied. To understand how bamboo structures bird communities and why some species might be specialists here, I carried out projects for my Master’s dissertation.

Associated publications:

  • Srinivasan, S., Kumar Pradhan, D., Rai, S., Biswakarma, A., & Srinivasan, U. (2025). Poles Apart: The Structure and Composition of the Bird Community in Bamboo in the Eastern Himalaya. The American Naturalist, 205(6), 656–665. https://doi.org/10.1086/735417
  • Srinivasan, S., Biswakarma A., Pradhan D. K., Rai S., & Srinivasan U. (2026). Bamboozling Interactions: Interspecific associations within mixed-species bird flocks in bamboo in the Eastern Himalaya. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2026.123477 (in press, Animal Behaviour).

How does habitat shape high-elevation bird communities over two decades?

We analysed a 20+ year old dataset from a bird monitoring program to understand long-term effects of land use change on bird densities and compositions in the Trans-Himalaya.

Associated publication:

  • Srinivasan, S., Thinley, T., Gurmet, K., Mishra, C., & Suryawanshi, K. R. (2025). Impacts of land use on bird communities in the Western Himalaya: Insights from a two-decade-long monitoring program. Ecological Applications, 35(8), e70157. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70157

We made the journal cover for this! Also covered by Mongabay India.

I wrote a blog post on this for Bird Count India

For a full list of my publications, please see my Google Scholar profile.