Species diversity, population structure, and regeneration status of trees in Fakim Wildlife Sanctuary, Nagaland, Northeast India

Abstract

Abstract. Ao A, Changkija S, Tripathi SK. 2020. Species diversity, population structure, and regeneration status of trees in Fakim Wildlife Sanctuary, Nagaland, Northeast India. Biodiversitas 21: 2777-2785. The plant species composition and diversity represent the overall health of the forest ecosystems and provide useful insight on forest conservation, and the species regeneration is important in assessing the potential of the forests to serve the society on sustained basis. This present study aimed to assess the species diversity, population structure, and regeneration status of the trees in temperate forest of Fakim Wildlife Sanctuary, Nagaland, Northeast India. Tree species composition, population structure and regeneration status were analyzed by randomly establishing eight plots of 0.1 ha within the sanctuary. Density, basal area, abundance, evenness, and other diversity indices were calculated for mature trees with girth at breast height (GBH) ≥ 30 cm. A total of 60 tree species belonging to 40 genera and 27 families were recorded. The most dominant families recorded were Lauraceae and Rosaceae. The total tree density recorded from the forest was 432.5 individuals ha-1 with a basal area 42.8 m2 ha-1. Cinnamomum zeylanicum and Lithocarpus pachyphyllus had the highest density with 17.58 individuals ha-1 and Lithocarpus pachyphyllus had the highest basal area with 2.64 m2 ha-1. The species with the highest IVI was Betula alnoides (17.13). Girth class of 30-60 cm had the highest density and basal area with 280 individuals ha-1 and 20.7 m2 ha-1. The diversity indices such as Shannon-Wiener index, Simpson index, Pielou evenness index, and Margalef species richness index were 3.90, 0.93, 0.92, and 11.59, respectively in the wildlife sanctuary. The present study showed that 41% of tree species exhibited good regeneration status, 31% as fair regeneration, 8% as poor regeneration and 20% had no regeneration. The present data will be useful to understand the current status of tree species and will serve as baseline information to the forest department, policymakers and conservationists to develop management plans for the conservation of priority species in the area.

Forest structures and carbon stocks of community forests with different forest management in Maha Sarakham Province, Thailand

“…The small size (≤9.5 cm class) showed the highest tree density but then declined as the bigger size class increased. The results are consistent with previous reports that tree density decreased from smaller to bigger size classes (Ao et al 2020;Rawal and Subedi 2022). The number of species and Shannon diversity index (Figure 2B-C) drastically decreased from small to bigger dbh class in all forests.…”

Tree diversity and vegetation structure of the tropical evergreen forests of the southern slopes of Meghalaya, North East India

“…Whitmore (1990) has also recorded patchy ground flora distribution in most tropical rainforests. The dominance of families like Fagaceae, Lauraceae, Euphorbiaceae, Myrtaceae, and Rubiaceae in the study area is similar to the tropical rain forests of Pasoh reserve forests in Malaysia, tropical wet evergreen forests, Western Ghats (Giriraj et al 2008), the wet temperate forest of Nagaland (Ao et al 2020) and sub-tropical forests/sacred forests in Meghalaya (Manokaran et al 1990;Mishra et al 2004;Tripathi and Khongjee 2010;. One of the unique features of the sub-tropical evergreen forests of southern Meghalaya is the presence of Fagaceae as one of the dominant families with 11 species.…”

“…That may be considered moderate as compared to species richness in neo-tropical forests, which ranges from 20 species ha -1 in the Varzea forest of Rio Xingu, Brazil (Campbell et al 1992) to 307 species ha -1 in the Amazonian Equator (Valencia et al 1994) and other tropical forests where it ranged from 26 species ha -1 in Kolli hills of India (Chittibabu and Parthasarathy 2000) to 231 species ha -1 in Brunei Darussalam of Southeast Asia (Poulsen et al 1996) and 76 species ha -1 recorded in evergreen tropical forests, Meghalaya ). However, it may be considered as considerably higher when compared to other sites in southern and central Western Ghats, viz., 30 species ha -1 in Nelliampathy (Chandrashekara and Ramakrishnan 1994), 57 species ha -1 in Mylodai forest of Courtallum (Parthasarathy and Karthikeyan 1997), 60 species ha -1 recorded in the wet temperate forest of Fakim Wildlife Sanctuary, Nagaland, India (Ao et al 2020), and 75 species ha -1 recorded in the tropical dry deciduous forest of the Eastern Ghats, India (Gandhi and Sundarapandian 2020).…”

“…The higher values of the diversity indices imply that the forest exhibits high diversity and abundance of tree species (Adekunle et al, 2013). Shannon-Weiner values for tree species diversity in the present study ranged from 3.74-3.95 (mean 3.85±0.06), which is comparable to that of Varagalaiar tropical evergreen forest of Western Ghats, India 3.93 (Ayyappan and Parthasarathy 1999), tropical forests in Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh, India 3.76-3.96 (Naidu and Kumar 2016), tropical forest of Garo Hills, Meghalaya 3.78-4.27 (Kumar et al 2006), evergreen and sub-tropical forests, Meghalaya 4.2-4.21 , betel leaf agroforest, Meghalaya 4.1 (Tynsong and Tiwari 2010) and wet temperate forest of Fakim Wildlife Sanctuary, Nagaland, India 3.9 (Ao et al 2020). However, Shannon-Weiner values in this study are much higher than that of the areca nut agroforest of Meghalaya 3.3 (Tynsong and Tiwari 2010), sacred groves of the Jaintia hills, Meghalaya 3.42-3.55 (Upadhaya et al 2003) and Khasi hill sal forest, 3.39 (Tripathi and Shanker 2014).…”

Assessment of tree diversity in tropical moist deciduous forest of Mizoram University, Northeast India

“…Further, information reported that these forest regions are characterized by high rainfall, humidity and favourable temperature. The previous studies reported that species diversity is based on the species richness and evenness (Ao et al, 2020), and the richness in-creasing from the pole to equator (Roy et al, 2004). Thus, the floristic composition of the vegetation changes gradually due to forest degradation and recovering during the course of succession (Singh et al, 2015).…”