Journal of Biodiversity, Bioprospecting and Development

Forests are major repositories of biodiversity and provide essential goods and services for humanity. Biodiversity loss is a major threat to forest ecosystem and emerging as a great challenge to humanity. Estimation of biodiversity or biological richness of a region is a difficult task that is an impossible goal without technological inputs. The Northeast India, part of Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, is one of the still relatively undisturbed regions of the world harbouring almost 50% of the flowering plant of the Indian subcontinent. This region is economically less developed and forests are under tremendous pressure from the anthropogenic influences mainly due to the local traditional shifting (jhum) cultivation practices. This article aims to bring an overview on current state of forest biodiversity and its conservation strategies in the Northeast India including traditional knowledge of conservation in this region. Further, the emphasis has been placed on various approaches of biodiversity characterization with the use of information technology like GIS to plan proper conservation and prioritization for sustaining the biodiversity of the region.

The main purpose of this article is to study the viability of Ulpotha micro-cascade rehabilitation with its traditional irrigation system. Rehabilitation of Ulpotha with its natural resources was started on pilot basis in 2005 and completed in the year 2010. This is the high time to study the impacts of Ulpotha rehabilitation with its traditional irrigation system. Extensive studies on traditional irrigation practices were commenced in 2013 and more positive impacts of the Ulpotha rehabilitation and the use of traditional irrigation were noted. The traditional irrigation system is more appropriate for this location as paddy is the main cultivation in Yala and Maha. Traditional flood irrigation also supports environment, ecology, biodiversity, agriculture in addition to socio-cultural and religious/spiritual values.

Desmodium gangeticum is one of the important species of ethno- medicinal plant. It finds its uses in numerous medicinal preparations including many industrial applications. Inspite of an important medicinal plant, till date little work have been conducted towards its molecular characterization and conservation. Therefore the present study was designed to bring out the relationships among different available accessions and study biodiversity conservation through simple sequence repeat (SSR) and inter transcribed spacer markers. The analysis revealed that intrapopulation mean genetic value (1.835) and Shannon (0.641) values vary among the accessions. However through AMOVA analysis, we observed that only a small variation exists among these accessions (P=1). The dendogram generated through distance matrix using the SIMQUAL-Dice Coefficient module of NTSYS pc ver matches to some extent with the PCA graph. In the barcode ITS marker analysis UPGMA shows the clustering of accessions into two groups. It is thus concluded that above based markers can be used for the population conservation and authentication of the above plant and could also be a lead for other medicinally important plants.