Tein McDonald (Chair) Tein has been working in restoration in Australia for over 4 decades as a practitioner, planner, author and journal editor. She has also been involved with SER since its inception and in the SER Australasian Chapter since 2012. Her doctoral research was on harnessing natural regeneration potential, and she is committed to spreading the word about the potential to harness natural regeneration in restoration through this group.
Ramesh Venkataraman. (Co-chair) Ramesh is Managing Trustee, Junglescapes Charitable Trust and a Board member of SER. Junglescapes has had significant success using natural regeneration over the last dozen or more years, generating livelihoods and ownership and custodianship of the restoration among local communities. Ramesh initiated this natural regeneration network to spread the word to others globally. He is also a member and Treasurer of the SER board.
Anand Krishnamurthy (Correspondence Secretary). Anand has been working with Junglescapes, Southern India for 17 years. His goals is to strive, through this group to spread the word about incorporating natural regeneration in restoration and explore how it can lower cost as high cost pathways have low impact. He is of the view that we need to make the process of using nature-based solutions to recover our natural environment a way of life in our countries.
Jagruti Rathod (Minutes secretary). Jagruti is an Assistant Professor at Navrachana University, Vadodara Gujarat India, working in Biodiversity & Conservation, Urban, and Wetland Ecology. She is also Founder and Director of the Centre For Nature & Ecosystem Wellbeing (CNEW). She would like to see the SER-NRN network connect more people from different countries with respect to different types of regeneration activity. Moreover, humans should live their lives traditionally, with minimum use of natural resources, allowing nature itself to regenerate their own selves.
Jen Ford (Committee Member) Jen is passionate about using natural regeneration in restoration, having worked professionally with natural regeneration for over 25 years in Australian tropical, subtropical rainforests, wet and dry sclerophyll forests and wetlands. While planting is obviously necessary where there is no potential for regeneration, regeneration has strong potential for restoring large areas and it can sometimes be done for lower cost.
Sean McNamara (Committee Member). Sean is Principal Advisor at the Wet Tropics Management Authority in North Queensland Australia. His experience has been in ANR in SE Asia for the last 20 years (Laos and Vietnam). Most recently he has worked at some small test sites on community ANR in some rather highly modified areas. He has a big interest in natural regeneration and how to get areas restored at scale – and so is very happy to be involved in the Network.
Robin Chazdon (At Large Committee Member). Robin is Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut USA, where she worked for around 3 decades – and is now a consultant and part-time Research Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast Australia, to which she travels usually once a year. Robin is also a co- director of the new Assisted Natural Regeneration Alliance – a global alliance focusing largely on regenerating forests – whose work is 0highly complemetary to the SER-NRN.