Nivedita Varma Harisena

Nivedita Varma is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Marie and Louis Pasteur. She works on understandng how multi-species assemblages can organise themselves in various landscape configurations, and how such assembly can inform species genetic diversity using metacommunity and population genetics simulations. 

Her research finds applications mainly in human-altered environments and contributes to the understanding of how landscape planning must be informed by robust ecological theories to preserve species diversity.

In her PhD she worked on understanding how time-lags in species assembly processes, as a response to landscape change over the past century, can continue to impact current species diversity and occurrence patterns. 

• Phd in landscape and urban studies from ETH Zurich, Switzerland (doctoral thesis from 2021-2025)
• Masters in Geoinformation and Earth Observation specialising in Natural Resource Managemet from ITC Faculty of Geoinformation and Earth Observation, Enschede, The Netherlands (2017-2019)
• Masters in Environmental Planning from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India (2015-2017)
• Undergraduate degree in Architecture from College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram (2010-2015)

• Since 2026  - Post Doctoral researcher at University of Marie and Louis Pasteur in the ThéMA lab, Besançon, France
• 2021-2025 - Phd researcher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• 2020-2021 - Product Engineer at ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) in Sharjah, UAE
• 2019-2020 - Senior Research Associate in the Natural Capital team at GIST Mumbai, India
• 2016 - Intern at World Wide Fund (WWF) assessing impact of linear infrastructure in southern western ghats, New Delhi, India 
• 2014 - intern at Footprints Earth, Ahmedabad, India

ITC excellence scholarship, University of Twente, The Netherlands (2019)

Gold medalist in Environmental Planning, School of Planning and Architecture, India (2017)

- Habitat connectivity

- Landscape and Urban ecology

- Spatial Statistics

- Community ecology

- Spatio-temporal modelling

•Harisena, N. V.(2025). Investigating the legacies of the past: Influences of spatio-temporal landscape dynamics on current biodiversity patterns. (Doctoral dissertation, ETH Zurich). ETH Zurich Research Collection. https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-c-000785962

• Harisena, N. V., Grêt-Regamey, A., & Van Strien, M. J. (Submitted; Preprint in biorxiv). Shape and rate of landscape area and configurational change trajectories influence species persistence. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.08.04.666294

• Harisena, N.V., Grêt-Regamey, A. & van Strien, M.J. (2025) A novel method to assess spatio-temporal habitat availability for a generalist indicator species group in human-modified landscapes. Landsc Ecol 40, 103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-025-02124-x

• Harisena, N. V., Grêt-Regamey, A., & Van Strien, M. J. (2024). Identification of metacommunities in bioregions with historical habitat networks. Ecology and Evolution, 14(8), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.70076

• Harisena, N. V., Groen, T. A., Toxopeus, A. G., & Naimi, B. (2021). When is variable importance estimation in species distribution modelling affected by spatial correlation? Ecography, 44(5), 778–788.  https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.05534