Dr. Kanivalan Iwar a botanist, his research interests broadly include plant taxonomy and systematics, biological diversity, plant community ecology, agrobiodiversity, and plant genetic resources. He did long-term research in the Southern Western Ghats mountains and documented species diversity, distributions, vegetation structure, and ecologically important taxa. Through this, he acquired a broad spectrum of expertise, including taxa inventorying, identification, herbarium work, eco-community analysis, and floristic assessment. He has a special interest in rare, endemic, and threatened taxa.
Well along, he worked on the characterization and conservation of plant genetic resources at the National Agrobiodiversity Center–Genebank, National Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea, where he expanded his international research experience, which covered seed micromorphology and morphological and phenotypic analyses of Allium germplasm. Through this experience, he integrated cutting-edge laboratory and analytical methods with conventional plant science.
With an emphasis on understanding the richness, distribution, taxonomy, evolutionary relationships, and conservation status of woody plant species, his current research is on Dendrophy of the Eastern Ghats. To provide a thorough knowledge of the woody flora of the Eastern Ghats, the project incorporates molecular systematics, ecology, phylogeographic techniques, and climate-change perspectives. In this, complex taxa, endemism and vulnerable groups, as well as their genetic and ecological linkages and their susceptibility to environmental and climatic changes, have received special attention. His goal is to contribute to the long-term conservation, evolutionary understanding, taxonomic resolution, and documentation of the Eastern Ghats' woody plant diversity through this effort. To provide trustworthy scientific information for biodiversity conservation and the sustainable management of plant genetic resources, his broader research objective is to integrate conventional plant taxonomy with molecular, ecological, spatial, and computational methodologies.