Edible wild relatives of Indo-Malesian fruit trees endemic to the Western Ghats of the Peninsular India

Abstract

Western Ghats, the abode of several botanical entities with promising economic value in modern field of horticulture and plant breeding, covers a biogeographic region of 160,000 km2 along the West Coast of the Peninsular India (Nayar, 1996). This biogeographic zone has multi-dimensional biological affinities with distant landmasses like Malesia, Africa and Polynesia. The present article discusses seven promising, but mostly lesser-known, wild endemic fruit trees of common Indo-Malesian genera found to occur on the slopes of the Western Ghats.