Keywords:
Phyto-ecological study, Floral diversity, Forest, Shishi Koh Chitral, Northern Pakistan
Despite the fact that numerous studies have evaluated floristic features of certain regions, there are still inaccessible and understudied places within hotspot, such as the Shishi Koh Valley, Chitral mountain region of the Hindukush. Present study evaluated the taxonomic, ecological and habitat diversity of the plant communities in the study area. We adopted a random sample methodology to determine the presence of plant species, and then used multivariate ecological community analyses to determine the species composition based on various ecological features. A total of 67 plant species, belonging to 31 families were reported. Fabaceae had the highest number of species (11). The leading leaf spectrum was nanophyll (26 species). The response to light analysis revealed that 63 (94%) of the species recorded from the study area were heliophytes. Therophytes were the dominant life form with 28 (42%) species. Clustering analysis revealed three clusters of different habitat types based on the floristic similarity. Similarly, the PCA showed considerable variation in habitat types, in which specific groups of species were more related to specific habitat types in comparison to others. This study may be useful in building management strategies to enable sustainable forest landscape exploitation and improved management in this remote Himalayan landscapes.
Taxo-ecological data collection in Shishi Koh Valley, Chitral
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The authors are thankful to Islamia College Peshawar, Pakistan and the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan. The authors are also thankful to all others who helped us in this research.