The Western Ghats, Western Ghauts or the Sahyādri constitute a mountain range along the western side of India. This range runs north to south along the western edge of the Deccan Plateau, and separates the plateau from a narrow coastal plain along the Arabian Sea.

The range starts near the border of Gujarat and Maharashtra, south of the Tapti river, and runs approximately 1,600 km (990 mi) through the states of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala ending at Kanyakumari, at the southern tip of India.

These hills cover 160,000 km² (62,000 sq mi) and form the catchment area for complex riverine drainage systems that drain almost 40% of India. The Western Ghats block rainfall to the Deccan Plateau The average elevation is around 1,200 m (3,900 ft).

The area is one of the world’s ten "Hottest biodiversity hotspots" and has over 5000 species of flowering plants, 139 mammal species, 508 bird species and 179 amphibian species; it is likely that many undiscovered species live in the Western Ghats. At least 325 globally threatened species occur in the Western Ghats.

Madhav Gadgil (born 1942 Pune ) is an Indian ecologist.

He was born in Pune, Maharashtra studied biology at University of PUNE and University of Mumbai before doing a Ph.D. thesis in the area of mathematical ecology at Harvard University. He has been an IBM Fellow of the Computing Centre, Research Fellow in Applied Mathematics and a Lecturer in Biology at Harvard University.

From 1973 to 2004 he was on the faculty of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore where he founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences [1]. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at Stanford and as a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Prof. Madhav Gadgil's research interests include population biology, conservation biology, human ecology and ecological history and he has published over 215 research papers and 6 books, "This Fissured Land" and "Ecology and Equity", "Diversity : The cornerstone of life" , "Nurturing Biodiversity: An Indian Agenda" “ Ecological Journeys”,and “People’s Biodiversity Registers: A Methodology Manual”. Two of his research papers have been recognized as citation classics. He writes regularly for popular media in English and Indian languages.