Ayan Mondal, Nilanjan Das, Sudipto Mandal,
Volume 4, Issue 1 (3-2022)
Abstract
The domestication of rice (Oryza sativa L.) has a rich history with its diversification from wild progenitors based on genetic differences. For human benefit, natural environments have been agriculturally modified. Concurrently, the biodiversity of natural or wild environments is greatly affected. Here, a comparison has been made between the biodiversity associated with wild-type rice and domesticated rice fields. Species were categorized into broad groups, i.e. Arthropoda (Arth), Other Invertebrate (OInv), Vertebrate (Vert), Algae (Alg), Fungi (Fng), Pteridophyta (Ptrd), and Higher Plant (HPlan). Physico-chemical factors including water depth (WD), water pH (pH), temperature (T), total hardness (TH), dissolved organic carbon (DOC), turbidity (Turb), and dissolved oxygen (DO) were measured directly in the field. Statistical analysis such as Student’s t-test, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for equal distributions, tests for dominance and multiple indices including Simpson, Shannon, and Evenness were used to assess the biodiversity. Furthermore, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) were used for community comparisons, and SIMPER analysis was used to assess dissimilarity between taxa. The Artificial Neural Network model (ANN) was applied to assess the relative importance of factors governing the system. The present study showed the assemblage of species in the wild along with domestication. The vertebrate species number was well correlated with all the other biotic groups indicating a bottom-up controlling pattern in the rice field ecosystem. The ANN analysis showed that of the environmental factors examined, WD played the most important role followed by pH, T, DOC, and DO as the next most influential factors in distinguishing wild and domesticated rice field ecosystems. SIMPER analysis demonstrated that arthropods were a major contributor to dissimilarity. Collectively our results showed that the domestication of rice led to a decline in biodiversity.
Krishnendu Mondal, Pooja Chourasia, Shilpi Gupta, Kalyanasundaram Sankar, Qamar Qureshi,
Volume 4, Issue 2 (6-2022)
Abstract
In order to understand the generalist nature of leopards and whether they have any degree of specialization, a study on resource selection of the Indian Leopard (Panthera pardus fusca) was carried out in a tropical dry deciduous forest in Sariska Tiger Reserve, Western India from January 2007 to May 2011 with the use of camera trapping under the mark-recapture framework. Camera trapping was done in an intensive study area (230 km2) encompassing 200 camera locations on 85–130 occasions each year. In total, 40 Indian leopards were identified in the study area, of which seven individual leopards were selected for resource selection analysis. Resource selection by Indian leopards was investigated at two scales. First, habitat selection was studied using compositional analysis comparing habitat availability in the geographic range of all seven Indian leopards and utilization by the individual animals within it. The results showed that habitat selection was non-random (P< 0.001). The leopard’s preference of habitat selection was in the following order: Boswellia forest> Anogeissus forest> Acacia forest> Butea forest> Zizyphus forest> Barren land> Scrubland. Second, resource selection was studied through a generalized linear mixed-effect model (GLMM) comparing the resource availability and utilization in each leopard’s range. The results showed that leopards preferred Anogeissus dominated forest followed by Zizyphus mixed forest and scrubland. In addition, leopards preferred habitat with a higher encounter rate of sambar (Rusa unicolor) and chital (Axis axis) and to a lesser degree of use, habitat with a higher livestock encounter rate. The results revealed that Indian leopards showed a significant degree of preference for moderate to thick vegetation cover and wild prey species rather than areas with open forest types and domestic prey species.
Kalyan Mukherjee, Ayan Mondal,
Volume 5, Issue 2 (6-2023)
Abstract
In this paper, we present a preliminary checklist of butterfly larval host plants from the Bankura and Purulia districts, which are a part of the Chotanagpur Plateau of West Bengal, India. The authors found 223 plant species from 52 plant families, which were used as larval hosts by 124 butterfly species. In terms of the use of plant families and species, we discovered a strong positive association between Nymphalidae and Hesperiidae and between Lycaenidae and Pieridae. According to our two-way ANOVA findings, there are notable variations in plant usage among butterfly families, which were elaborately discussed using hierarchical classical clustering. Most of the plant species utilized were from the Fabaceae and Poaceae families.
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