Impact evaluation · 2024–25
UNEP Tide Turners
Can a plastic challenge that plays like a game change what students do?
55% ahead of non-participants on household recycling
Read the evaluationConservation Science Researcher · India
Tarun K. Verma
I study what conservation records leave out, and I build free tools so that more people can check the evidence for themselves.
Open to doctoral research and collaborations
- UNEPLed the India component of the Tide Turners evaluation
- 1,800+wildlife trade cases mapped in WildTrace
- 50+trade codewords in Hindi and Telugu
Where it started · Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve
Where the question started
Recorded offences fell from 225 to 98 in a year.
My analysis was not that offending had stopped, but that cases were no longer being registered once COVID-19 arrived .
I had no second record to check it against, and that gap has shaped my work since. I now read every dataset for who made it, in which language, and who had no way to reach it.
01 · Research
Four blind spots I work on
Who kept the record?
A fall in reported crime can mean that fewer cases were recorded, so I read the record and the recorder together.
Which language was it in?
At WCS-India, a species that appeared absent in English was openly advertised in Hindi .
Did people actually change?
I use trials and interviews to check whether a programme changed what people do, and not only what they say.
Who got to play?
Badges, points and nature films ask people to care. I study what they change, and who gets left out.
02 · Selected work
Selected projects
Five projects, from a UNEP evaluation to free research software. Swipe or use the arrows to move through them, and each card opens the full account on the Work page.
Open atlas · 2026
WildTrace
An open atlas of illegal wildlife trade, every case graded by its evidence.
1,800+ graded cases, updated daily
Explore the project
Archive and map · 2022–24
Protected Area Update
Thirty years of Kalpavriksh’s conservation news, searchable and mapped.
6,000+ reports, 1,000+ coded by me
See how it was built
Free software · 2026
Sift QDA
A free alternative to NVivo. Your interviews never leave your computer.
₹0 licence, works offline
Meet Sift
Media observatory · ongoing
Species on Screen
Does the attention nature media earns turn into care, or into demand?
1,056 YouTube videos and 573 comments on beavers, first case study
Visit the observatory01 / 05
03 · Latest
What’s new
04 · Kind words
Kind words
Tarun combines the eye of a practitioner with the rigorous curiosity of an academic.
He was relentless in his pursuit of learning more about wildlife and the issues they face.
Tarun has consistently demonstrated himself to be a community-driven and technically sound individual.
During the Tide Turners fieldwork in Barmer, a teacher climbed a tree in her school yard to find enough phone signal to register her students.
I want the records we build for nature to count her too.
05 · Quick answers
About Tarun K. Verma
Who is Tarun K. Verma?
Tarun K. Verma (Tarun Verma, Tarun Kumar Verma) is a conservation science researcher from India, raised in Udaipur, Rajasthan . He works on illegal wildlife trade, conservation behaviour change and impact evaluation, and builds open-source research tools such as WildTrace and Sift QDA. Before moving into science, he worked with Raghu Rai’s photography magazine from 2015 to 2018, where he learned to read an image for its framing, its timing and what it leaves out.
What has he worked on?
He led the India component of the impact evaluation of UNEP’s Tide Turners Plastic Challenge at ATREE, with the University of Oxford. At WCS-India he monitored online wildlife trade and built a lexicon of more than 50 trade codewords in Hindi and Telugu. At C-TARA, IIT Bombay, he coded three decades of Kalpavriksh’s Protected Area Update into a public, mapped database.
Which methods and tools does he use?
Randomised trials and pre-post surveys, interviews through translators, thematic analysis, QGIS, Python, text classification and open data pipelines. When a tool is expensive or missing, he builds a free one.
Is he open to PhD positions or collaboration?
Yes. He is looking for doctoral research in engaging media, conservation behaviour and digital evidence, and is glad to hear about collaborations. Message him on LinkedIn.
06 · Outside work
On a bicycle, at a window, behind a camera
