Twenty two-year-old Santosh Lalji Yadav, son of a milk supplier from a Dahisar chawl with three dependent siblings, whose sheer passion for conservation sent him on the road of academics six years ago will receive the Young Naturalist Sanctuary-RBS Wildlife Awards 2008, on Thursday, for his inimitable efforts in protecting the fragile habitats of the city and the state.

After studiously and consistently documenting plant diversity in the SGNP ¿ a passion since he was 16 — Yadav is currently recording the flora of Roha taluka in Raigad and in Nasik where he has already listed 1,500 species of plants. He is also working at Dediapada taluka in Narmada district. “Borivali Park is a unique place and my first love, he says adding, “It’s just a 103 sq meter forest but has over 1,300 species of plants besides a large species of reptiles and mammals. And yes, the existence of leopards in this small park is a wonder.”

A post-graduate in angiosperm taxonomy from St Xaviers College, Fort, Yadav recalls his initial encounter with formal education: “I was an average student throughout school and college. During my BSc days in Thakur College, Kandivli, only two subjects interested me ¿ botany and zoology. But my first revelation came when I visited the interiors of the SGNP for a field visit. Suddenly, I was hooked to the forest and there has been no looking back ever since.” Yadav’s first trail was at Silonda about 2 km inside the park.

Still awed by the experience, he says, “That was a field visit for my botany class and it struck me how the forest has its own life its own laws. It was its own ecosystem, fresh and untainted despite being so close to a city. And I learnt that it was the mother of all water sources in the city”.

In the years to come, Yadav was compelled to return to the forest time and again, simply out of sheer admiration he had developed for it. “At the end of my Bachelors, I began identifying, understanding and classifying several plant species just by spending time with them and studying them,” he says.  He completed his MSc studying and documenting the major fruiting trees at SGNP.

Tireless, humble and reserved, Yadav attributes his boundless energy to Dr Marselin Almeida, one of India’s finest botanists, who he adopted as his teacher years ago. Recently, with Almeida, he re-classified two plants Phrynium cannaefolia and Atlantia acidissima, which were wrongly classified.