India: An Amphibian Hotspot

Speaker: S. D. Biju (Sathyabhama Das Biju) - Professor, Department of Environmental Studies, University of Delhi, India; Radcliffe Hrdy Fellow, Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Associate, Museum of Comparative Zoology; and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
Scientists estimate that only 30 percent of Earth’s biodiversity-including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi-is known. Due to human activities, habitats across the world are changing or being destroyed. As a result, an increasing number of organisms are threatened or on the brink of extinction-even before they have been documented or described. Amphibians-a group that includes frogs, toads, salamanders, and newts-are particularly vulnerable to habitat changes, pollution, and drought, and species in this group are becoming extinct at alarming rates. In this talk, S. D. Biju discusses his thirty years of research on the frogs of India and Asia and highlights the key role that scientists play in the conservation of species.
About the Speaker
S. D. Biju (Sathyabhama Das Biju) is an amphibian biologist whose research focuses on the systematics, evolution, behavior, and biogeography of amphibians, as well as their conservation through the discovery and documentation of species. Popularly known as the “Frogman of India,” his three decades of work has attracted global attention to amphibians in South Asia, and an upsurge in scientific knowledge. He is the only Indian herpetologist to describe 116 new amphibian taxa (2 families, 10 genera, 106 species)-nearly 25 percent of the country’s diversity. Biju’s contributions to amphibian research and conservation have received prestigious recognitions such as the IUCN/ASG SABIN Award 2008 and Indian State Government’s highest civilian award Kerala Sree 2022. He was elected to the Indian National Science Academy in 2023.
Biju has published over 100 research articles in scientific journals, including Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His findings have appeared in BBC, National Geographic, CNN, Times, Forbes, The Economist, New York Times, and The Guardian.
During his extensive field studies in forests across Asia, Biju has photographed amphibians with the aim of documenting their diversity, life histories, and behaviors. His photographs have appeared in books and media articles in over ten world languages, have been featured as the covers of several magazines including The Economist (2012), and selected among various best photography categories in Nature magazine (2012), National Geographic (2012), and The Guardian (2017).
S. D. Biju holds a PhD in botany from the University of Calicut, India, and a second PhD in animal science from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.