Arun Dayanandan is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale School of the Environment, where he studies under the mentorship of Professor Mark S. Ashton. He is also a Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Botanical Garden. His research examines the ecological and management dimensions of tropical plantation forestry, with a focus on positioning plantations as active agents in global restoration strategies. Through field inventories and trait-based analyses in commercial-scale plantations across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, he investigates how plantation governance and management influence regeneration dynamics, functional diversity, and the recruitment of native species. His work integrates these data with biodiversity and stand dynamics theory to evaluate how plantations can function as successional catalysts that enhance degraded landscapes along the restoration trajectory.
