Diversity of Woody Flora and Physico-chemical Attributes of Soil in the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Nadu, India
2022
Vignesh, Arumugam | Sivalingam, Ramamoorthy | Vasanth, Krishnan
The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve is an International Biosphere Reserve in the Western Ghats of South India. It is very rich in plant diversity and having more endemic and threatened species. The present study focuses on woody species diversity observed on evergreen forest of the Nilgiri Hills. A total of 133 plant species belonging to 89 genera of 54 families has been enumerated. The quantitative characters such as density, frequency, relative density, relative frequency and basal area and absolute values were calculated. The Simpson’s index and Shannon–Wiener index such as 0.985 and 4.540 indicated rich floral diversity. About 38% of the space and resources were shared by the top 10 species and the remaining 62% was shared by 123 species, as indicated by their important value index (IVI) values. Out of 133 woody species, 13.5% of the species were found to be rare in the study area, and such species require specific microhabitat condition. The physico-chemical characters of the soil provided the information about soil properties, electrical conductivity (EC), organic carbon (OC), and nutrients impact on species diversity. The results revealed that Pearson correlation and principal component analysis (PCA) showed a positive correlation between the soil parameters and species diversity.
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