The relationships among diversity, productivity and climate are complex, especially in tropical ecosystems; and are less studied. We studied here the bi-and tri-partite relationships between and among the plant diversity, productivity and climate variables (i.e., temperature, precipitation and moisture) in a tropical ecosystem in India by analyzing three forest types for the year 2010. Comparison of productivity (Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach model derived-net primary productivity, NPP) and climate condition with respect to 2001 showed significant increase in NPP and temperature and overall decrease in precipitation and moisture condition in last decade. The NPP for sal forest ranged from 579.4 to 1,142 for the year 2001 and 557.2 to 1231.6 g Cm -2 year -1 for the year 2010. The mean monthly temperature varied from 18 to 21.8°C and 26 to 27°C; and the annual precipitation varied from 15 to 45 and 32 to 76 cm/year for the year 2001 and 2010 respectively. Strong correlation was observed between monthly mean temperature and productivity during 2001, while a decrease was observed during the year 2010. The ecosystem has shown a trend of rapid drying in last decade, triggering more detail studies for understanding of the eco-climatology. In general, sal forest, a natural forest sowed higher diversity and productivity followed by mixed deciduous (MD) forest and teak plantation. Though, areas with higher NPP are well correlated with higher temperature, precipitation and moisture; they seem to be related to species density rather than diversity. However, there is a need to have year-on-year assessments in order to ascertain if this difference represents a real phenomenon rather than an artefact of sampling. The pilot study helps in understanding the complex relationships and is very useful in the fast changing climate.
The development and growth of geospatial techniques offer many advantages and challenges to the study of biodiversity, especially in the present era of climate change.We are now at the beginning of the international decade for biodiversity and by the time we travel through the decade, there would be sea-changes in the measurement and monitoring approaches, database management options, and inter-linked studies on biodiversity. With the onset of geoinformatics techniques comprising remote sensing, global positioning system (GPS), integrative tools, such as GIS, is realized as a complimentary system to ground-based biodiversity studies. Recently, a nationwide biodiversity study at landscape level using geoinformatics modeling techniques for India has been completed. The study has assessed plant diversity using a three-tier approach, wherein six biodiversity attributes (i.e., spatial, phytosociological, social, physical, economical, and ecological) were linked together based on their relative importance to stratify biological richness of forest vegetation (non-agricultural) of India. It has enumerated 7,964 plant species from 20,000 nested quadrate sampling plots of 0.04 ha each, delineated and mapped 120 vegetation classes; and organized the geo-spatial database on bisindia web portal. Here, we have (i) proposed a method to incorporate the fauna component in-line up with the existing methodology and (ii) utilized the GPS-gathered positional information on the distribution of two species (i.e., Medicago sativa and Poa annua to simulate their distribution for the year 2020 (SRES A1-B scenario, IPCC) using Maxent model. The study conducted in a test site of western Himalayas estimated (i) 24% increase in the overall biologically rich areas on supplement of fauna data and (ii) distribution of both the species would tend to increase in favor of shorter cold season. The study highlights the importance of geoinformatics techniquebased biodiversity study for its amenability to incorporate any further change or modification, and utility of the geo-spatial biodiversity database for simulating various species
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