"Tracing ecosystem change through sedimentary ancient DNA"
Speaker : Dr. P. Ramya Bala
DST-INSPIRE Faculty, NIAS
@ pramyabala@nias.res.in
Chairperson : Dr. Vani Kulkarni
DBT – Bio Care Fellow, NIAS
@ : vani.kulkarni@nias.res.in
Date : 25th March 2026
Time : 9.30 AM
Venue : Lecture Hall
Abstract: The tropical biome of the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve (NBR) in southern India was established under the UNESCO ‘Man and the Biosphere Programme’ for sustainable development to protect both natural and cultural heritage. The NBR has seen human occupation for centuries (perhaps millennia) as evidenced by megalithic dolmens and boasts of a living heritage of over 6 protected vulnerable tribal groups. The forests of the Western Ghats including the Nilgiris were at the core of procurement for the spice trade, leaving behind intriguing legacies in global food habits (black pepper, cinnamon, mace and nutmeg). However, very little of the human-forest interactions from prehistoric times is known from this region. This leaves a large gap in our collective understanding of this ecosystem and its peoples – a gap we aim to fill through sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA), giving us access to unexplored dimensions on the peopling of NBR, and the creation of the ‘hotspot’ itself. We began our work on DNA from plants; we plan to work on fungi and mammals, including the Bengal tiger, believed to have populated southern India in the Holocene. A critical part of this project is to develop site-specific multi-DNA methods for application on tropical peat cores, i.e. optimization of the DNA metabarcoding approach for assessing plant and mammal biodiversity to establish the “best” method for DNA recovery and appropriate “multi-DNA” method for maximum taxonomic richness information from our peat cores. Our multi-DNA tests for improving taxonomic richness information are original and innovative contributions with a wide potential for application in other tropical biomes, in contexts previously thought unsuitable for DNA studies but widely regarded as the first frontier of human civilizations and hotspots of biodiversity and speciation.
About the speaker: Dr. P. Ramya Bala is a DST-INSPIRE Faculty currently working on ‘forest fire-vegetation-human inter-relationships in the past in the tropical dry forests of southern India’. She was awarded the INQUA Fellowship in 2024 to spend 6 months at EDYTEM Laboratory, Le Bourget du lac, France, to work on ‘I-HUMANE: Investigating inter-relationships between humans and the natural environment in deep time in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve, southern India’. The fellowship is a flagship initiative of the International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA) to develop collaborative research by facilitating mobility of researchers from low and middle income countries to gain international experience.