Tarun K. Verma

Who was looking

how records, media and games shape what we know about nature, and what people do for it

Illustration of a cyclist on a road through the green Aravalli hills of Rajasthan at dusk, framed by camera viewfinder marks

Hi, I’m Tarun, a conservation social scientist with a first degree in computer science. I study whether environmental programmes change what people do, and whether the records we use to measure that change can carry the weight placed on them. I work with enforcement files, online trade listings and news archives, and more and more with the games and apps that ask people to care for nature.

The thread began before science. Between 2015 and 2018 I worked with Raghu Rai’s photography magazine, where I learned to read an image for its framing, its timing and what it leaves out. I took that habit to Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve , where recorded offences fell from 225 in 2019 to 98 in 2020. My reading was not that offending had stopped but that cases were no longer being registered once COVID-19 arrived, and who was looking has been my question ever since.

At WCS-India I met the same problem in software. A species that appeared absent in English was openly advertised in Hindi , so I built a lexicon of more than 50 vernacular trade codewords. At IIT Bombay I coded three decades of conservation news for the Protected Area Update archive. At ATREE I led the India component of the evaluation of UNEP’s Tide Turners Plastic Challenge with the University of Oxford, a programme that works like a game.

My toolkit mixes field and code: randomised trials, interviews through translators, QGIS, and Python for text classification. When a tool I need is expensive or missing, I build an open one, so that people outside well-funded universities can use it too.

What keeps me going is simple. Conservation money follows evidence, and a lot of that evidence only shows the people who could reach the system. In Barmer, a teacher climbed a tree in her school yard to find enough phone signal to register her students. I want the records, games and programmes we build for nature to count her too.

I am looking for doctoral research in engaging media, conservation behaviour and digital evidence, and I am always glad to hear about a collaboration.

what’s new

foci in a nutshell

  1. Records and who keeps them

    Enforcement files, news archives and online listings each carry a trace of the people who made them. I read the record and the recorder together, so that a drop in reported crime is not mistaken for a drop in crime.

  2. Language and the wildlife trade

    Illegal wildlife trade online moves through local languages and codewords. I build monitoring that works in Hindi and other Indian languages, with the people who speak them, and test where machine classifiers fail.

  3. Behaviour change you can measure

    Randomised trials, surveys and interviews that check whether a programme changed what people do, and not only what they say they will do. My current work is on who a programme reaches and who it misses.

  4. Games and media for nature

    Badges, points and routes are now an ordinary way of asking people to care for nature. I study what gameful programmes and nature media actually do, and who gets to play.

things I’ve built

Open, citable and free to use. Each one began as a tool I needed for my own research. Watch the two-minute film.

kind words

I have watched him evolve into a researcher who is deeply concerned with the science of visual storytelling. Tarun combines the eye of a practitioner with the rigorous curiosity of an academic.

Raghu Rai, Associate Photographer, Magnum Photos, and Trustee, Raghu Rai Foundation

Most students in his position would have struggled silently, but he did the opposite. He was relentless in his pursuit of learning more about wildlife and the issues they face.

Dr Sapna Bhargava, Course Coordinator, Department of Wildlife Science, University of Kota

Tarun has consistently demonstrated himself to be a community-driven and technically sound individual.

Dr Shivali Kharoliwal, who taught him biostatistics and mentored his dissertation analysis, University of Kota

off the clock

You will usually find me on a bicycle, at a car window watching green country go past, in a kitchen, or behind a camera. The long plan is to see as many forms of life on Earth as I can, on every continent, and to learn from the people who have known them longest. More on the journey page.