Tropical dry evergreen forests in India protected by religious and cultural beliefs

Tropical dry evergreen forests in India protected by religious and cultural beliefs
mongabay.com
June 9, 2008

Tropical dry evergreen forest has restricted global distribution — limited to parts of Asia (on the Coromandel coast of India, northern Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand), Africa and Central America — but is highly variable in terms of height and the species it contains, depending on site location, soil type and the level of human impacts. A new study, published in the June issue of Tropical Conservation Science by N. Parthasarathy and colleagues, looks at tropical dry evergreen forest on the Coromandel coast of India where the ecosystem occurs both in patches and as sacred groves or temple forests protected by the local people on religious grounds.

Surveying plant diversity and flowering and fruiting events, the team of Indian researchers from Pondicherry University classified the state of tropical dry evergreen forest across 75 sites.

"We classified the sites based on the level of species diversity, human interactions and efforts made for site protection into relatively undisturbed, moderately disturbed and much disturbed," the researchers told mongabay.com. "More importantly plants of medicinal value were listed out and their local traditional knowledge documented.

The authors recommend forest protection initiatives for diverse sites with limited disturbance and restoration strategies using native plant species in moderately and heavily disturbed areas. Parthasarathy and colleagues suggest that "revitalizing the cultural traditions associated with sacred groves by promoting awareness of the ecological and bioresource values of tropical dry evergreen forest" would help the conservation effort.

N. Parthasarathy, M. Arthur Selwyn and M. Udayakumar (2008). Tropical dry evergreen forests of peninsular India: ecology and conservation significance. Tropical Conservation Science Vol. 1(2): 89-110, 2008

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