How to Identify Rare and Endangered Ferns and Fern Allies

Identification of rare and endangered plant species is the first requirement for any conservation programme. The IUCN guideline is the only available method to identify the rare and endangered species and it requires vast data on the wild population of the target species. None of the biological characters, which are playing main role in the survival and distribution of several species, is used in IUCN guideline. In the meantime there are several difficulties in following IUCN guideline, particularly the non availability of complete field data. Moreover, the same guideline can not be used for all the groups of species in equal importance. The vascular cryptogams, pteridophytes, are also an important component of any mountainous flora and they have also to be conserved in nature. As they are the primitive vascular plants on the earth, they are getting depleted in the flora due to various reasons and it is the right time to identify the rare and endangered pteridophytes to conserve them. By considering various difficulties of IUCN method for the identification rare and endangered pteridophytes, a very simple method has been adopted by using just four criteria and this method can be applied to Pteridophytes from any region of the world

Glimpses of Tribal Botanical Knowledge of Tirunelveli Hills, Western Ghats, India

In the present paper, 46 plant species of angiosperms belonging to 19 genera of Euphorbiaceae that occur naturally in the Tirunelveli Hills of western Ghats, India, were chosen for study. It was found that the uses of Euphorbiaceous plants by the inhabitants of this region cover a number of broad categories including food, various kinds of poisons, medicines, sundry types of oils, waxes, rubbers, varnishes, compounds for paints and other industrial products

The BioKET Biodiversity Data Warehouse: Data and Knowledge Integration and Extraction

International audienceBiodiversity datasets are generally stored in different for-mats. This makes it difficult for biologists to combine and integrate them to retrieve useful information for the purpose of, for example, efficiently classify specimens. In this paper, we present BioKET, a data warehouse which is a consolidation of heterogeneous data sources stored in different formats. For the time being, the scopus of BioKET is botanical. We had, among others things, to list all the existing botanical ontologies and re-late terms in BioKET with terms in these ontologies. We demonstrate the usefulness of such a resource by applying FIST, a combined biclus-tering and conceptual association rule extraction method on a dataset extracted from BioKET to analyze the risk status of plants endemic to Laos. Besides, BioKET may be interfaced with other resources, like GeoCAT, to provide a powerful analysis tool for biodiversity data

Medicinal ferns of North Eastern India with special reference to Arunachal Pradesh

516-522The Pteridophytes constitute the primitive vascular plant groups which are found scattered all over the world including India. Investigation had been made on medicinal values of higher plants but Pteridophytes are often ignored. In spite of the luxuriant growth of the plants in an around Arunachal Pradesh, North East India they had not been studied medicinally. The present study has been designed to assess the medicinal uses of 51 Pteridophyte species belongs to 28 families on the basis of field surveys and taxonomic identification of plants used by tribals of the Arunachal Pradesh of North Eastern India in their traditional methods of treatment of various diseases, and ailments like stomach disorders, poisonous bites, rheumatics cough, asthma, fever, diabetes, etc. are presented

Micropropagation of <i style="">Crataeva magna</i> (Lour.) DC-A medicinal plant

136-138Rapid multiplication of C. magna, a medicinal plant, was achieved by culturing nodal segments on Murashige and Skoog’s (MS) medium supplemented with sucrose (3%) and different concentrations of benzyl amino purine (BAP). Nodal segments cultured on MS medium supplemented with 8.8 µM of BAP produced multiple shoots (4.4+0.09) with maximum length (63.2+0.92 mm). Rooting of the excised shoots cultured on 9.84 µM of IBA in combination with 0.54 µM of NAA in half strength MS medium was found suitable. Rooted plants established with 68% success rate in pots after hardening.