Plant Biodiversity, Ethnobotany and Anthropogenic Interventions of Western Ghats Forests – Saputara and Purna

Book excerpt: Biodiversity most commonly refers to the number and variety of distinct organisms (species) living on the Earth. Biological variety encompasses all life forms on earth including species of plants, animals and microorganisms and the ecosystem and ecological processes. Biodiversity stands for the number, variety and variability of living organisms. Biodiversity areas are featuring outstanding concentrations of species, and experiencing incomparable loss of habitat. It was observed recently that the present 25 hotspots of the world have been raised to 34 hotspots with a new list of 9 new hotspots in the great range of the Himalayas and the island nation of Japan. In general, the 34 important areas once covered 15.70% of the Earth’s land surface. In total, 86% of the hotspots have already been destroyed, such that the intact remnants of the hotspots now cover only 2.30% of the Earth’s land surface. These areas together, now cover 1.4% of the land on the Earth. Tropical forests appear in 15 hotspots, Mediterranean-type zones in 5 and 9 hotspots are majorly of islands. 16 hotspots are in tropical area, about 20% of the human population lives in the hotspot regions. India is one of the leading hotspots in terms of endemics. The three hotspot of Biodiversity in India are i) Eastern Himalaya harbouring 9,000 species of plants with 3500 endemic species; ii) Western Ghats possessing 5800 plant species with about 2000 endemics; and iii) The Andaman and Nicobar Islands harbour about 83% endemic species. The Western Ghats of India extends upto 1,80,000 sq km, extraordinarily rich in biodiversity. The existing forests are highly fragmented and facing the prospect of increasing degradation. The Western Ghats cover the portion of the Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamilnadu. Keeping all these in minds, the present book Plant Biodiversity, Ethnobotany and Anthropogenic Interventions of Western Ghats Forests – Saputara and Purna covers an in-depth and systematic study of forest vegetation in terms of community structure analysis, qualitative community structure, quantitative community structure, ethnobotanical studies, and anthropogenic pressures in biodiversity rich forests (Saputara and Purna), a northern extreme regions of Western Ghats. The book would definitely be the need of an hour for forest managers, forest conservationists, policy makers, and decision authorities to prevent the unrestrained exploitation of forest biodiversity and resources, destruction of potential forested habitats, and uncontrolled interactions of man and technology with forest ecosystems of the world.