Conservation status and diversity of some important plants in the Shiwalik Himalaya of Uttarakhand, India.docVIP

Int. J. Med. Arom. Plants, ISSN 2249 – 4340 RESEARCH ARTICLE Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 75-82, September 2011 Conservation status and diversity of some important plants in the Shiwalik Himalaya of Uttarakhand, India Jyotsana SHARMA*, R.D. GAUR, R.M. PAINULI Department of Botany, HNBGU, Srinagar (Garhwal)-246174, Uttarakhand, India Article History: Received 5 September 2011, Revised 24 September 2011, Accepted 25 September 2011. th th th Abstract: The Shiwalik Himalaya of Uttarakhand is rich in its floristic composition. It also represents varied population of forest dwellers, locales, and tribal communities which play a vital role in social, cultural, historical, economic and in- dustrial development of any country and in maintaining its ecological balance. Traditionally the folk people and the lo- cales utilize the vegetation of their ambient environment in form of different products as food, fodder, fuel, medicine, fibre, timber etc. Among these useful species most of them are commercially exploited by drug dealers and at present many of such species come in threat categories. Therefore, there is an urgent need for conservation of such species for sustainable development. The members of threatened taxa belong to different families as Acanthaceae, Aceraceae, Aste- raceae, Berberidaceae, Caryophyllaceae, Dioscoreaceae, Fabaceae, Hypoxidaceae, Lamiaceae and Liliaceae etc. The present study provides comprehensive infromation on the diversity, conservation status and utilization of plants in Shiwa- lik Himalaya. Keywords: Ethnobotany; indigenous knowledge; biodiversity conservation; sustainable development. Introduction The Uttarakhand Himalaya has its unique setting with in the Western Himalayan region, represents about 3800-4000 species of flowering plants and embodies more than one fourth of