Jagdish Krishnaswamy is one of India's leading ecohydrologists generating knowledge that informs India's complex challenges in managing ecosystems and rivers for sustaining water for humans and nature.  He runs a network of instrumented sites in the Western Ghats mountains and in the Sikkim Himalaya that have generated novel data on impacts of land-cover transformations on hydrology.  He is particularly interested in enhancing capacity of civil society to monitor changing hydrology of natural and managed ecosystems, and has run training programs with an emphasis on field hydrology. 

Jagdish's work on landscape ecology contributed to the declaration of the Western Ghats of India as a UNESCO World Heritage site and his study on the impacts of iron ore mining on sediment load helped the Supreme Court of India to make a decision to shut one of India's largest iron ore mines in Kudremukh.

The work of Jagdish and his colleagues since 2001 has helped raise the profile of ATREE as one of Asia's leading applied environmental science research institutions.