Dr. Madhura Niphadkar-Bandekar has a deep love for nature and the wild, instilled in her since her childhood in the lovely city of Pune, surrounded by hills and famous for being the ‘Oxford of the East’. After getting a Masters in Geography, she worked as an environmental work facilitator at a boarding school in the idyllic Western Ghats, teaching and learning with rural folk. The geographer in her inspired her to learn techniques of mapping forests with satellite data, which she later applied in projects related to biodiversity mapping. Subsequently she has worked primarily in academia on applying these geospatial techniques to find answers to diverse questions in ecology, in India and abroad, with national and international teams. These applications have ranged from mapping forest fire-proneness in chaparral shrublands in California, and mapping orangutan habitats in Indonesian rainforests, to delineating distribution of invasive shrubs in moist-deciduous forests of India. Madhura currently works on mapping effects of invasive woody plant Prosopis juliflora on salinity and ecology of Banni grasslands in the Kutch, Gujarat.
With a strong belief in data sharing and open access, she was a part of the team which built the India Biodiversity Portal – an open access public web-portal for collation of Indian biodiversity data. Along with a team of 6 dedicated naturalists and social workers, she has co-founded a non-profit organization – Foundation for Environment Research and Conservation – which works on biodiversity documentation, solid waste management, community based eco-tourism and social awareness in Goa. Parallel to her love for nature, her interests in music and social commitment have enriched her life with diverse activities. She is a member of the managing committee of Shadj Gandhaar Music Academy, a school for Hindustani music. She is also serving as the current Vice-President of the Gomantak Lokseva Trust, which runs a home for destitute women in northern Goa; and facilitates the working of an organic farm in South Goa.