Assessment of alpine summit flora in Kashmir Himalaya and its implications for long-term monitoring of climate change impacts

In an era of climate change,the availability of empirical data on alpine summit vegetation in the Himalaya is still scarce.Here we report the assessment of alpine summit flora in Gulmarg Wildlife Sanctuary,Kashmir Himalaya.We employed a globally standardized Multi-Summit Approach and four spatially isolated summits spanning an elevation gradient of 210 m(between 3530-3740 m a.s.l.)from natural treeline to nival zone were studied.Sampling of the summits was carried out in the year 2018 to collect floristic data together with records of soil temperature.A total of 142 vascular plant species were recorded in the sampled summits.Majority of the species were of herbaceous growth form and with perennial life span.Based on Raunkiaer’s life form,hemicryptophytes were the most dominant followed by therophytes and phanerophytes.The summit flora showed the predominance of narrow-endemic species,with broad-and non-endemics declining with elevation.A significant relationship between growth form,Raunkiaer’s life form,and the degree of endemism with elevation was observed.Both species diversity and soil temperature showed a monotonic decrease with increasing elevation.Interestingly,soil temperature clearly determined the magnitude of species diversity on the summits.Furthermore,based on floristic composition,the lowest summit had the highest dissimilarity with the rest of the summits.The present study employed globally standardized protocol to scientifically assess the patterns of plant diversity on the alpine mountain summits of Kashmir Himalaya,which in turn has wide implications towards long-term monitoring of climate change impact on alpine biodiversity in the rapidly warming Himalaya.

Hunting of hunted:an ensemble modeling approach to evaluate suitable habitats for caracals in India

Background:Large-scale hunting and various anthropogenic pressures in the recent past have pushed the Asiatic caracal(Caracal caracal schmitzi),an elusive medium-sized and locally threatened felid species towards local extinction in India.Though widely distributed historically,it has been sparsely reported from several regions of central and northern states in India till twentieth century.Later,the species distribution became confined only to the states of Rajasthan,Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh,which have had reported sightings in the twenty-first century.In order to highlight the potentially suitable habitats for Asiatic caracals in India,we targeted forth-filtering of the spatial model ensemble by creating and utilizing the validated and spatially thinned species presence information(n=69)and related ecological variables(aridity,NDVI,precipitation seasonality,temperature seasonality,terrain ruggedness),filtered with anthropological variable(nightlight).Results:Out of eight spatial prediction models,the two most parsimonious models,Random Forest(AUC 0.91)and MaxEnt(AUC 0.89)were weighted and ensembled.The ensemble model indicated several clustered habitats,covering 1207.83 km^(2)areas in Kachchh(Gujarat),Aravalli mountains(Rajasthan),Malwa plateau(Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh),and Bundelkhand region(Madhya Pradesh)as potentially suitable habitats for caracals.Output probabilities of pixels were further regressed with converted vegetation height data within selected highly potential habitats,i.e.,Ranthambore Kuno Landscape(RKL)(suitability~0.44+0.03(vegetation height)^(**),R^(2)=0.27).The regression model inferred a significant positive relation between vegetation height and habitat suitability,hence the lowest ordinal class out of three classes of converted vegetation height was masked out from the RKL,which yielded in an area of 567 km^(2) as potentially highly suitable habitats for caracals,which can be further proposed as survey areas and conservation priority areas for caracals.Conclusion:The study charts out the small pockets of landscape in and around dryland protected areas,suitable for caracal in the Indian context,which need attention for landscape conservation.