Need for a centralized digital inventory on floral additions

The Convention on Biological Diversity encourages member countries to document their diversity and make it available for general use1. Consequently, apart from new species, additions to the country2 and state floras3 are being reported. Compilation of floral information for Himachal Pradesh (HP) revealed that duplicity of additions is not uncommon, wherein the same taxon has been reported as a new addition to the HP flora more than once. A minimum of eight such duplicate additions were found (Table 1). This is a serious limitation that emanates from the limited resources (journals, books, flora, etc.) that an author, referee or reviewer may have access too. At the same time, increase in the number of publishers and journals makes it even harder to keep track of them. It would thus be desirable to have a centralized digital inventory of recent additions to the Indian flora as is available for the global new plant species (www.ipni.org). The Botanical Survey of India, a Central Government organization with a mandate of documenting floral diversity of India, has already initiated an important activity in this direction and has come up with the book4, Plant Discoveries 2010. This is a valuable contribution and making it available on the web would further enhance its visibility, use and importance. Similar initiatives should also be taken up at the state level. A nodal agency in the state may opt for such a task of documenting, compiling and hosting on the net, additions to the flora of the respective states. Once done, the author, referee or reviewer just needs to check this list before preparing or recommending a publication reporting new addition( s). This would not only check duplicity of additions, but would be of great help to the scientific community where spatio-temporal additions to the flora can be analysed. Updating such a list would be much easier on the web and thus real-time information would be available to the users. The success of e-floras and virtual herbarium is noteworthy and therefore, resources (financial and human) should be channelized for this activity also. Importantly, a mechanism needs to be evolved by which an author/journal who/that publishes a new addition furnishes this information to the nodal agency

Extent of Occurrence and Area of Occupancy of Tallow Tree (Sapium sebiferum): Using the Red list Criteria for Documenting Invasive Species Expanse

Invasion by exotic species is a prime threat to biodiversity and information on their expanse is pivotal for effective management of bioresources, with this perception we worked out the extent of occurrence (EOO) and area of occupancy (AOO) of Sapium sebiferum (L.) Roxb. in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh (HP), as is done for IUCN plant threat categorization. Three methods namely aerographic method (AM), cartographic method (CM) and cartographic method by conglomerates (CMC) were deployed and compared for the same in the geographic information system environment. As expected, the three results varied amongst themselves, with AOO being 1127.58, 4046.00 and 734.12 sq km for AM, CM and CMC, respectively. On the other hand the EOO was 4,091.44 sq km. This is a considerable expanse and amounts to more than 7 % of the total geographical area of HP. Based on field surveys and observations, CMC was found to give the most reliable estimates. Though, primarily devised by IUCN for threat categorization of native species, we feel that EOO and AOO may appropriately be applied to invasive species also