Students and early-career conservationists and researchers often require funding to support their research activities, attend conferences, and participate in capacity-building workshops. However, formal training in fellowship and grant writing remains limited in the current higher education landscape.

This workshop is designed to address that gap by introducing participants to the key concepts and practical aspects of fellowship and grant proposal writing. Attendees will gain an understanding of different types of funding opportunities, including fellowships, research grants, and travel awards. They will also be introduced to best practices for developing strong, competitive applications, such as aligning proposals with funder priorities, clearly communicating research objectives, and preparing effective supporting documents like CVs and budgets.

In addition to technical skills, the workshop will cover important ethical considerations in grant writing, including transparency, plagiarism, and responsible research conduct. The workshop will also explore the use of Generative AI (GenAI) tools in drafting funding proposals. While these tools offer valuable assistance in idea structuring and language refinement, their limitations and ethical implications will be critically discussed.

Overall, the workshop aims to equip participants with both the knowledge and confidence needed to navigate the competitive landscape of research funding successfully.

Conservation research, practice and outcomes critically depend on engaging with human communities, in diverse social and cultural landscapes. Human action in relation to environment is guided by our ability to think, imagine and form meaningful relationships with other humans and the non-human world. At the same time, it is constrained and shaped by social structures and institutions, most notably by relationships of power and inequality in society. Conservation challenges, such as protected area management, ecological restoration and human-wildlife conflict, must be understood in this context.

This interactive workshop will introduce participants to qualitative research methods that are valuable in making sense of this inter-related complexity of social worlds and human action. Qualitative research paradigm follows a distinctive approach to the nature of our social reality (ontology) and how we can create valid theoretical knowledge about this reality (epistemology). Researchers build on this approach to understand and explain life-worlds and actions of human beings in different contexts, whether the forest guard in a village, the elderly leader of a pastoral community or the corporate manager who is an amateur birdwatcher and wildlife enthusiast.

This workshop will draw upon research in fields like political ecology and environmental anthropology to demonstrate the value of qualitative methods in conservation research and practice. The advantages and challenges of two key methods—in-depth interviews and participant observation—will be explored in due course. Using interactive methods, hands-on activities and role play, the workshop will discuss the significance of bias, value judgments and ‘hidden transcripts’ in researching with human subjects.

Education, when designed thoughtfully and delivered with care, empathy and sensitivity, can serve as a powerful tool for lasting change. It can potentially address shifts in behaviour, attitude, or knowledge, forming the foundation for effective and affective conservation education programmes.

This workshop will explore conservation and nature education in the Indian conservation sector and contexts.

The why, what, and how of utilising education theory, practice and frameworks for interventions with different stakeholders will be explored, discussed and challenged. Ongoing and past projects in various conservation, geographical and stakeholder contexts will be explored through case studies. Participants will also be introduced to tools, approaches, and assessment methods to design and implement education and outreach interventions in their field sites.

In groups, participants will design the initial idea of education interventions, targeting specific goals and outcomes. The workshop will include a reflective exercise on the ethical considerations and conundrums in conservation and nature education in India.

GIS is a tool used in conservation science that incorporates ecological, spatial, and socio-economic data. This helps us visualise, analyse complex data across space and time. The workshop is divided into two parts: a theory, which will discuss the basics of GIS and its application in conservation biology, followed by a training session on using QGIS as mentioned below:
Theory

1. Introduction to GIS (Theory)
2. Applications of GIS in different fields (Theory)
3. Different file types and databases related to GIS and GIS-based analysis

1. Introduction to QGIS
2. Installation of QGIS
3. Importing and exporting data using QGIS
4. Raster analysis
5. Vector analysis
6. Mapping

Students with sampling data (coordinates) are encouraged to apply. If you don't have data, you will be provided with some datasets to analyse.

Biodiversity conservation is fundamentally a human endeavor—driven by people’s values and commitment. Therefore there is a growing recognition that social science skills can play a vital role in conservation. To be more specific, human interaction skills are critical to conservation practice especially in conflict-ridden situations and include the ability to recognise and understand different values, ideas, feelings and opinions to resolve disputes, solve problems and work collaboratively towards conservation goals. Despite this, there is a significant gap between the recognized need for training in human interaction skills and the actual training available to conservationists (see Conservation Biology 1996 Vol 10(4) and 2025 Vol 39(2)).

Hence, in this workshop we propose to draw from the principles of counseling psychology to equip participants with essential human interaction skills that will enable them to conduct sensitive interviews with stakeholders in the domain of human-wildlife conflict. They will also learn about attending behaviors to foster genuine rapport, foundational listening skills to understand participant narratives in a non-judgmental way, and effective responding skills to engage empathetically and thoughtfully. Together, these competencies will help them to build a working alliance with stakeholders and ultimately enhance the quality and impact of conservation efforts.

This workshop explores how to tell powerful stories about the natural world that draw from science and field research and speak to people beyond it. It is designed for scientists, budding writers, photographers, field conservationists; anyone who wants to communicate their work more effectively.

Although rooted in writing, the workshop draws from Roundglass Sustain’s rich repository of films, photo essays, and visual art to show how storytelling can be multi-dimensional and multi-media, especially in today’s age of fleeting attention spans.

• Find the right angle
• Dissect the anatomy of a compelling story
• Discover unexpected intersections with culture, music, and art
• Use plot devices such as character building , dialogue, and voice
• Craft a pitch

We’ll also talk about how to infuse even the most urgent or grim topics with clarity and wonder, and how to find that perfect balance between fact and feeling.

At the heart of this workshop is a belief: great science needs great storytelling. Much of the vital work in wildlife and climate science never reaches the wider public; And if your work doesn’t connect, the hope of building empathy for the natural world diminishes.

We’ve worked with scientists, artists, writers, filmmakers, and conservationists to shape stories that resonate—and through this workshop, we’ll help you do the same.

Free moderate-resolution data from Landsat (at 30 m resolution) and Sentinel (at 10 m resolution) allows for large and small scale environmental mapping of land cover classes, which allows for understanding how a natural landscape has changed, and how their change affects wildlife populations. Through this workshop, I seek to introduce participants to existing open source and free tools for land cover mapping from the initial stage of data querying and data download to creating an accurate land-cover map for a location and its visualisation for publication. The focus will be on using a little-known optimised command-line program called FORCE (Framework for Operational Radiometric Correction for Environmental monitoring) that has many useful modules for a variety of purposes. The modules that will be taught include radiometric corrections, spectral temporal metrics for better training data, and machine learning models for classification. I will also teach them how to incorporate R code and QGIS in the workflow involving FORCE to create a modelling framework that is solely dependent on free and open access software, thereby making it reproducible. While reproducibility is a requirement for the scientific method, most studies in the field of ecological geospatial analysis are unfortunately un-replicable as they are 1) dependent on memory-hogging GUI-based paid software 2) without any replicable code or proper documentation for methodology. Through this workshop, I aim to change this practice, and help liberate spatial science, a necessity for developing countries like India who simultaneously lack key resources and also face rapid massive environmental damage.

Many questions in ecology and conservation science involve count data, such as the number of individuals of a species, the number of species (species richness), counts of behaviours performed by animals, counts of events such as crop damage, counts involving binary data (sex ratio, disease incidence, survival, mortality etc.) and so on. How do we analyse and make sense of such data? Regular linear models, like regression and ANOVA, do not perform well with count data. However, there is a class of powerful models, Generalised Linear Models (GLMs), that works very well with such data. GLMs are now commonly used to analyse count data in ecology and conservation science. In this workshop, we will focus on understanding, modelling and arriving at conclusions to questions in ecology and conservation science that involve count data. We will aim to (i) get an intuitive understanding of the sampling processes that generate count data; (ii) fit and interpret GLMs to count data; and (iii) discuss common pitfalls to analysing count data and ways to overcome them. This session will involve both discussions of the way these models work and hands-on experience in fitting and interpreting them using the software R.

The popularity of games in conservation education has been increasing worldwide and has caught up in recent years in India too. Use of games enhances learning, they can be a good tool to explain complex ideas like climate change, biodiversity conservation. While there is a growing interest in conservation education and the use of games for the same, there is a lack of exposure and training on what exactly makes a game a game, how to design a game and how to evaluate whether the game is working for the objectives it has been created. Through a basic workshop involving the skills of 4 resource persons; Priti Bangal - ornithologist; Karthik Natarajan - Director - Fields of View; Prasad Sandbhor - game researcher; Peeyush Sekhsaria, - architect and geographer (all game designers in their own right) we propose to put the participants through a process that will help them understand game design better and equip them to work on games on their own.

If accepted, this will be the 3rd year running that we will be offering this workshop, based on the feedback received directly from the participants during the workshop and that received via SCCS we are tweaking the workshop to address some of the asks

An introduction to the recording and analysis of sound, produced by biological organisms, or affecting them. We will cover both active and passive acoustic recordings, as well as examples of their applications. Emphasis will be placed also on standard methods to data collections and analyze acoustic data, as well as common pitfalls and examples of good practice to use when recording. Finally, discussions will include examples of how this field has contributed to the field of conservation.