Debajit Datta is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He specializes in landscape ecology and environmental planning. He obtained BSc (Presidency College, Kolkata) in 2004 and MSc (University of Calcutta) in Geography in 2006. His doctoral research was on ‘Criteria and indicators for assessing sustainable community management of Sunderbans mangroves, India’ and was awarded PhD in 2012 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Before joining Jadavpur University in 2015, he was an Assistant Professor in the Education Service of Government of West Bengal since 2010.
He has extensively worked on the management of coastal and forest ecosystems of eastern India, potentials of ecotourism development and sustainable livelihood generation of indigenous communities for the last 14 years. At present, his prime research interests include blue carbon mapping, political ecology of common property resources, assessment of agroecosystem sustainability, and socio-ecological transformations of coastal landscapes. Debajit and the members of his Landscape Ecology Laboratory emphasize on a judicially mixed use of RS-GIS technologies, participatory appraisals, in-situ and laboratory based analyses of soil-water-plant samples, as well as published databases to comprehend the environmental complexities at ecosystem and landscape levels.
He has published more than 40 research papers and scientific articles in peer reviewed journals, edited book volumes, and periodicals. He was awarded research fellowships by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and University Grants Commission (UGC), India in 2006. He has conducted several research projects funded by the UGC, RUSA-JU, and Department of Science and Technology (DST) of Government of India (Mentor Scientist). Currently, he is engaged with a research project on the spatially explicit mapping of coastal carbon stocks funded by the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) of DST-India. He is a professional member of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE), Association of American Geographers (AAG), Geographical Society of India, and Indian Institute of Geographers (IIG). He is also serving as a board member and the ‘Regional Contact for South Asia’ of the Young Geographer Working Group of Asian Geographical Association.