Landscape Level Biodiversity Databases in India: Status and the Scope

Conservation of biodiversity requires management higher than the species level of organization, particularly at the landscape scale. It is, however, difficult to manage each threatened species individually. Alternatively, management can focus on the ecosystems that contain these species, and on the landscapes containing the ecosystems. The relatively new discipline of landscape ecology provides insight into both landscape diversity and the species diversity, and suggests a theoretical and practical basis for conservation planning. The information on the biodiversity characteristics such as species richness and their spatial distribution, economic, and the ethno-botanical importance is of great significance to any nation. The Department of Biotechnology and Department of Space, Government of India funded a nationwide project between 1998 and 2010 to characterize and map the flowering plants richness in the natural (forests, grasslands, scrub, etc.) and man-made (forest plantations) vegetation formations at landscape level. The spatial database on vegetation types generated using wet and dry season satellite imagery and ancillary data such as topographic maps and the species richness through field inventory were used to generate the spatially-explicit species distribution maps and statistics. A customized software package, SPLAM (Spatial Landscape Modeling) was developed for landscape analysis and spatial data integration. This, first of its kind unique study spanning over 12 years, has resulted in a large baseline spatial database on vegetation types, porosity, patchiness, interspersion, juxtaposition, fragmentation, disturbance regimes, ecosystem uniqueness, terrain complexity and the species richness. The field inventory involved 16,581 geo-referenced 0.04 ha plots across India and 7,761 plant species. The geospatially-tagged species database, created in the project, provides information on the endemic, rare, endangered, threatened, and medicinally/economically important species. The database, disseminated to large number of organizations including State Forest Departments, has found extensive applications in policy planning, operational management, biodiversity conservation, bio-prospecting, and the climate change studies.