GERMINATING RARITY

UTTARAKHAND HAS PUT TOGETHER AN EXTRAORDINARY ENDEMIC VEGETATION IN THE LAST THREE YEARS

- SEEMA SHARMA

SOME BEAUTIFUL photographs of a tulip garden in Uttarakhand’s Munsiyari town that gained traction on the internet a few days ago offered nature lovers some joy amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Tulip gardens are a minor part of the germplasm collection of rare and endemic vegetation biodiversity. In Uttarakhand, it has been put together by the Forest Research Centre (FRC) of the forest department during the last three years, a report of which was released by Sanjiv Chaturvedi, head of FRC, on May 24, 2020 in Haldwani. Germplasms are living genetic resources such as seeds or tissues that are maintained for the purpose of animal and plant breeding, preservation and other research uses. These resources may take the form of seed collections stored in seed banks, trees growing in nurseries, animal breeding lines maintained in animal breeding programmes or gene banks. Chaturvedi told Down to Earth that this was the third-biggest germplasm collection in the country, after the National Botanical Research Institute in Lucknow and the Botanical Survey of India in Kolkata. “People at large are suffering from Plant Blindness—the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment,” says Chaturvedi. We are more driven to conserve charismatic wildlife species, but not plant diversity, he says

Uttarakhand is home to a vast variety and unique range of floral and faunal diversity. The diversity, which includes 93 endemic species, is found in various types of vegetation—ranging from subtropical forests in the upper Gangetic plains and the Shivalik in the south to Arctic-alpine vegetation of the trans-Himalayan cold desert in Uttarakhand, according to studies.