Mr Arjun Gopalaswamy

Clarendon-Jason Hu Scholar

After completing a Bachelor's in Industrial Engineering from Bangalore University, India, it did not take me much time to realize that was not a career I wanted to pursue for a living. It had to be related to the wild. Since then, I worked with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Centre for Wildlife Studies in India in a long-term field project on tigers. I worked in many different reserves in central and south India, setting camera traps for sampling tiger populations and conducting line transect surveys to assess tiger prey densities. I did my Master's in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at the University of Florida, where I learnt many new field and analytical skills, including capture, immobilization and radio-telemetry of large carnivores, as well as new methods in statistical ecology. After my Master's I continued to work with the Wildlife Conservation Society in India and provided technical advice on tiger and prey monitoring in several tiger landscapes in Asia.

I am currently a third year D.Phil student at WildCRU and I am looking at addressing methodological issues in studies of tiger meta-population dynamics in the Western Ghats, India.

Publications:

Gopalaswamy, A. M., Royle, J. A., Singh, P., Hines, J. E., Jathanna, D., Kumar, N. S., Karanth, K. U. (In press) SPACECAP: A software package for estimating animal density using spatially explicit capture-recapture models. Methods in Ecology and Evolution doi: 10.1111/j.2041-210X.2012.00241.x

Gopalaswamy, A. M., Karanth, K. U., Kumar, N. S., and Macdonald, D. W. (In press). Estimating Tropical Forest Ungulate Densities from Sign Surveys using Abundance Models of occupancy. Animal Conservation doi:10.1111/j.1469-1795.2012.00565.x

Gopalaswamy, A. M., Royle, J. A., Delampady, M., Nichols, J. D., Karanth, K. U., Macdonald, D. W. (2012). Density Estimation in Tiger Populations: Combining Information for Strong Inference. Ecology 93: 1741-1751.

Lachish, S., Gopalaswamy, A. M., Knowles, S. C. L., Sheldon, B. C. (2012). Site-Occupancy Modelling as a Novel Framework for Assessing Test Sensitivity and Estimating Wildlife Disease Prevalence from Imperfect Diagnostic Tests. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 3: 339-348.

Patil, N., Kumar, N. S., Gopalaswamy, A. M., Karanth, K. U. (2011). Dispersing tiger makes a point. Oryx 45: 472.

Karanth, K. U., Gopalaswamy, A. M. , Kumar, N. S., Delampady, M., Nichols, J. D., Seidensticker, J., Pimm, S. L. (2011). Counting wild tigers, reliably. Science 332: 791.

Karanth, K. U., Gopalaswamy, A. M. , Kumar, N. S, Srinivas, V., Nichols, J. D., MacKenzie, D. I. (2011). Monitoring Carnivore Populations at the Landscape Scale: Occupancy Modelling of Tigers from Sign Surveys. Journal of Applied Ecology 48: 1048-1056.

Singh, P., Gopalaswamy, A. M. , Karanth, K. U. (2010). Factors influencing densities of striped hyenas (Hyaena hyaena) in arid regions of India. Journal of Mammalogy 91: 1152-1159.

Hines, J. E., Nichols, J. D., Royle, J. A., MacKenzie, D. I., Gopalaswamy, A. M. , Kumar, N. S., and Karanth, K. U. (2010). Tigers on Trails: Occupancy Modeling for Cluster Sampling. Ecological Applications 20: 1456-1466.

Royle, A. J., Karanth, K. U., Gopalaswamy, A. M. , Kumar, N. S (2009). Bayesian Inference in Camera-Trap Studies using a Class of Spatially Explicit Capture-Recapture Models. Ecology 90: 3233-3244.

Mondol, S., Karanth, K. U., Kumar, N. S., Gopalaswamy, A. M. , Andheria, A., Ramakrishnan, U. (2009). Evaluation of non-invasive genetic sampling methods for estimating tiger population size. Biological Conservation 142: 2350-2360.

Hiby, L., Lovell, P., Patil, N., Kumar, N. S., Gopalaswamy, A.M. , Karanth, K. U. (2009). A Tiger cannot change its Stripes: Using a three-dimensional model to match images of living tigers and tiger skins. Biology Letters 5: 383-386.

Royle, A. J., Nichols, J. D., Karanth, K. U. and Gopalaswamy, A. M. (2009). A Hierarchical Model for Estimating Density in Camera-Trap Studies. Journal of Applied Ecology 46: 118-127.

Carnivore ecology and conservation, quantitative ecology and statistical inference.