Germination Percentage and Seed Quality of different Forest Tree Species of Rajpipla Forest Range

Abstract

Rapid growth in human population last few decades has immensely increased pressure on natural resources like, land, forest, wildlife and other natural resources for their basic need and livelihood. It has also resulted into elevation of pollution due to increased use of the motor vehicles, mining activities, factories, pesticides, fossil fuel and forest fire. Increased pollution has played significant role in climate change. Effects of global climate change suggest the future need for restoration of forest will increase (Stanturf et al., 2014). For the remedy to reduce this increasing pollution, forest vegetation can play vital role by their ability to store atmospheric carbon and to accumulate suspended particulate matter over their leaves. Therefore, tree plantation is the one of the best option to mitigate pollution problem. Mainly tree plantation can be done as road side, river or canals side, railway track, degraded or wasteland, reforestation and afforestation programme and also in agricultural fields as farmer now-a-days preferring fast growing tree plantation for economic purpose. For tree plantation, sufficient number of seedlings of different tree species is the fundamental requirement. Generally, tree seedlings are prepared by collecting seeds from different seed sources and sowing them in nurseries. But, in nursery, forest staff does not have idea about the how much seed quantity to be taken or to be distributed to prepare required number of seedlings. Thus, without sufficient knowledge about seeds of particular tree species, they face problems like produced insufficient seedlings material or sometimes produced more than required seedling materials which become waste. To overcome this problem, nursery staffs should have sufficient knowledge about the seeds germination percentage, seed rate, seed purity and other seed parameters of each species planned to be incorporated in future plantation programme. Study on variability in seed characters and germination behaviour of species will help in identifying own seed lots for a planting programme (Kertadikara and Prat, 1995). Objective of seed testing is to get accurate and reproducible results regarding the purity, composition and the percentage of seeds that can be expected to produce good seedling under favourable conditions. Investigation on germination of forest seed is of a great interest among scientist as it is directly related to ecology of particular area (Nakar and Jadeja, 2014). Therefore, keeping above mentioned issues regarding seedling production, present study was carried out to help the forest staff to resolve such problem.