Exploring and understanding the floristic richness, life-form, leaf-size spectra and phenology of plants in protected forests: A case study of Dachigam National Park in Himalaya, Asia

Abstract

Protected areas are contributing people's livelihoods and working as the backbone of all forms of biodiversity conservation. The reformed rules and the legal local protection have come up as a means of conserving trees and associated diversity of life throughout the world. But due to the anthropogenic pressures and climate change especially in the global south and even those within the well-recognized national parks, community conserved forests, wetlands, nature reserves, and similar other species-rich sites are under human pressure. Lots of research works have been carried out related to conservation parameters, still, the qualitative studies on legal protection and management of forest biodiversity in many hotspots regions such as the Himalayas and Indo-Myanmar are lacking. Realising the future perspective of potential and economic valued higher plants in forests, the assessment of species composition of Dachigam National Park (DNP) was carried out in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) of Himalaya. A total of 181 plant species belonging to 129 genera and 56 families were documented from DNP. It has been observed that the species distribution pattern across the documented families was unequal, with 11 families contributing approximately half of the species number, while 21 families were monotypic and represented by only 1 species. Family Rosaceae (19) with the maximum number of species was the dominant group followed by Asteraceae (16 spp.) and Lamiaceae (10 spp.). In terms of functional trait diversity, herbaceous and perennial woody forms of plants were dominant over the other forms. The biological spectrum analysis revealed the dominance of therophyte life-form, indicating the disturbed vegetation in DNP. A multivariate ecological community analysis software was used to classify the phenological similarities and differences among the different flowering seasons. The phenological spectrum revealed the maximum plant flowering season ranges from March to June, where a total of about 53% species were recorded in full blooming. The leaf-size spectra were also investigated and found 36% of the structure were microphyll, followed by mesophyll (28%); the majority of the species (62%) had simple leaf lamina. These research findings provide important baseline data for better prediction of phenological shifts associated with Himalayan species over contemporary climate change and species composition of protected areas in Himalaya.