The United Nations biodiversity convention at the Earth Summit in Rio-de Janeiro held in June 1992 had the main objective of conservation and sustainable use of biological resources. The year 2010 has been declared the International Year of Biodiversity by the United Nations, which calls for safeguarding the irreplaceable natural wealth and reduce biodiversity loss. The prerequisite to any conservation effort requires a wide variety of data for planning and evolving effective conservation strategies. One of the key components of the data includes the data from herbarium specimens which have been collected by several botanists from different locations and at different times.
Herbaria are specialised institutions where botanical specimens are housed for scientific consultations. A herbarium is a repository of dried specimens of plants collected and arranged in a systematic order. Plant specimens in herbaria serve as reference materials for any plant based research and as source material for information on utilization, conservation, planning and management. The notes on the labels of the herbarium specimen sheets continue to provide data on botanical, ethnobotanical, and phytogeographical studies. The herbarium specimenns have become resources for generating the profile of chemical constituents and DNA fingerprinting. For example, it has been reported that phytochemical investigations of over 80-year old herbarium specimens contain the same quantity and quality of chemical constituens as in fresh plant specimens. Hence the herbarium has assumed significance in modern day context with the global realisation of herbal potential of the sub-continent especially in medicine and cosmetics. Herbarium specimens have also found utilities for carrying out research in other areas such as evolution, climate change, phylogeny, anthropogenic changes, bio-prospecting, anatomical and taxonomic studies, etc.
In an effort to identify the repositories of plant resources of india and its neigbouring countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, People's Republic of China, and Sri Lanka, which share a common socio-economic, cultural, spiritual, and medical lore and also plant diversity, NISCAIR has catalogued the herbaria of this sub-continent in the form of the "Handbook of Herbaria in India and Neighbouring Countries". It is expected that this would serve as a source book for reference on the herbaria of this region of the world.
India is one of the twelve megadiverse countries of the world and shares plant resources with the neighbouring countries. The wealth of plant resources gets reflected in herbaria, which house collections made centuries ago. Herbaria thus are valuable plant treasures, which serve the dual purpose of research and education. Though lifeless, herbarium specimens have generated immense interest for researchers in peeping into the past and making comparisons with the present. The genetic material present in the specimens enable scientist to use these for carrying out rapid phylogenetic analysis and also opens the possibility for their future use in recombinant DNA studies. Further, herbaria in this region could provide information on local traditional medicines used which could serve as leads for novel drug development.
Realizing the potential of herbaria, it is felt that a ready reference material in the form of a catalogue of herbaria needs to be created which could serve the interest of both botanists and laymen to access plant resource information. In this context NISCAIR had brought out a book "Handbook on Herbaria in India and Neighbouring Countries" in 2000. With the passage of one decade since this book was written, it was realized that the information content of the book needs revision. The present book includes current data of all the herbaria in India and adjoining countries. The additional feature of the revised volume is the information on the herbaria from the Republic of China due to commonalities of the floristic elements in the Sino-Himalayan region.
India with only 2,4% of the land area, accounts for 7-8% of the recorded species of the world primarily due to varied ecological and altitudinal conditions. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the west, and the Bay of Bengal on the east. It is bordered by Pakistan on the west; Bhutan, Nepal, and People's Republic of China in the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar (Burma) in the east. India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka, and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.
This region with its wide ranging physiograpic and climatic conditions supports a rich and varied flora, unparalleled by any other region of the world. This part of the world is a home of about 1,01,649 vascular plants species (@33%); of which 19,371 species are endemic to this region and 5447 species are reported to be endangered. Out of the 34 biodiversity hotspots of the world, four hotspots namely Himalays, Indo-Burma, Mountains of South China and Western Ghats and Sri-Lanka are existing in this region which togather harbour about 41,415 species of which 16,709 are endemic to these hotspots. India and China are also recognised as two of the seventeen Megadiversity centres of the world.
Herbaria, being the repositories of plants, provide the basis for an analytical study of the vegetation of a region for evolving strategies for effective conservation and sustainable utilisation. It may even be possible that herbaria may provide the source for learning the Materia Medica of the local people, a knowledge which might have evolved by the local people practicing for thousands of years. Intensive research work on such plants perhaps could enable developing novel bioactive drugs, which could be safer and more effective than the drugs available in market at present. The discovery of new active principles from plant resources draws immediate attention to herbaria where the specimens could be seen for recognition so as to identify specimens in nature for collection, utilization and further research.
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