The Eastern Ghat of India: A review on plant ecological perspectives

Abstract

The Eastern Ghats, a discontinuous range of mountains spanning Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka has a humid tropical monsoon climate with moderate to high temperatures and heavy rainfall. The Eastern Ghats offer a diverse range of flora and fauna, including endemics. The vegetation is classified into various forest types, including moist deciduous, dry deciduous, dry evergreen, evergreen, semi-evergreen, scrub jungles, and savannah. Eastern Ghat reflects the healthy carrying capacity of the ecosystem. The Eastern Ghats boasts a diverse plant community, with over 3200 flowering plant species, largely due to geographic factors, high seasonality, and elevational variations. The Eastern Ghats, a significant biodiversity granary in India, has been the subject of numerous taxonomic and quantitative surveys. The eastern coast of India's eastern forest (Eastern Ghats) is facing a decline in plant diversity due to overexploitation, habitat destruction, and rampant grazing. This has led to species loss and extinction. The forest cover has also decreased due to anthropogenic pressures. However, there is a lack of significant research on plant species population dynamics, soil surveys, soil chemistry, geomorphology, geobotany, pedology, edaphology, and phytochemistry. To address this, modern science and technology approaches, such as geomorphometry and geobotanical studies using Remote Sensing and GIS techniques, are the need of the hour.