Agrobiodiversity of Vegetable Crops in Agroecosystems in Iran

Abstract

Preservation and increase of biodiversity is one of the main components to achieve sustainability in agricultural systems. In this study, biodiversity evaluation indexes were used to evaluate and compare agrobiodiversity of vegetable crop systems among all provinces of Iran. In this study the biodiversity evaluation indexes included Shannon-Wiener, Simpson and Evenness. In order to compare the alpha and beta biodiversity in different regions of Iran, the country was divided to 5 different weather and geographic regions, then alpha and beta biodiversity were calculated by species – area relationship according to these areas. The results showed nearly 31 vegetable species are cultivated in Iran that the highest planted area after that tomato, potato and onion was related to aubergine with 6.07% of the total vegetable lands of Iran. The whole of vegetable lands area was 495412 ha that the Fars province with 8.83% of the total vegetable lands of the country, was the first and it was the major producer of 9 species of vegetables. The highest vegetable species richness was related to Esfahan and Mazandaran (29 species) and the lowest was for Chaharmahal bakhtiari (5 species). The Shannon index for these species in total vegetable lands (H) was 0.628 besides this index in highest level has been discovered in Yazd (2.70) and the Shannon index for these species of the total arable lands of the country ( ) was 0.210 besides this index in highest level had been discovered in Hormozgan (1.01). The highest (0.459) and lowest (0) of alpha biodiversity was calculated in north and south regions, respectively. In the other hand, the highest (1.41) and lowest (0.375) beta biodiversity was related to south and north regions, respectively