Biodiversity of India
Created | Updated May 13, 2013
Fellow h2g2 members,
I am from India and what follows is "preface" section of my book which is coming soon, that I would like to improve (as well as my English!) here. Could someone kind enough to hep me out? If style seems very boring (if!) may be an alternative style can be proposed? Any help will be highly obliged!
Preface:
Indian Biodiversity, albeit being one of the richest in the world with three of the 32 “Biodiversity Hotspots”, is unfortunately in a serious sate of neglect from the administration and the general public alike. Four big-sized animals, Pink-headed Duck, Himalayan Mountain Quail, Lesser Indian Rhinoceros and Indian Cheetah, have gone extinct in the last century alone. IUCN enlist India at 7th rank of shame-list, countries struggling to protect its biodiversity. With almost 18% of world population cramming into less than 2% of area, sub-continental forest cover has been steadily shrinking, so as its biodiversity. This report is first of its kind in India, a comprehensive assessment of status and trends of commonly found animals in the subcontinent with its up-to-date taxonomic positions, overview on the systematics, bio-prospecting and conservation. This work also serves as a “binomen dictionary”-for looking up binomial names of virtually every animal species that you might encounter in daily life in India.
The idea to write this book sprang from one of the class assignments as part of BSS.506: Biosystematics and Biodiversity course here at the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda. The assignment was to make a database of Indian Biodiversity. While I appreciate the passion that my students put in the creation of database, most of their entries were well-described taxa from North America and Europe-presumably obtained through online resources, highlighting the dire need to categorize Indian Biodiversity. Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) has published few checklists of animal taxa in India but those did not include several of the important animal phyla. Checklists merely enlist scientific names without common name or any other information and therefore their utility in practical identification is extremely limited. This inspired me to write a book with following focuses:
This book is still incomplete; as a privileged reader who appreciates the biodiversity, a column in all the tables are waiting for you to complete; “Name in Regional Language”. With seventeen official languages, India is so linguistically diverse that if I sought out to include a multilingual list of taxa covered in this book, it would have doubled the weight of this book and wasted a number of pages! Instead I made this book like a class-activity notebook; it is for you to find, identify and complete the name in local dialect/regional language in the space provided (Activity: 1). If you have a camera I suggest taking photographs of species that you come across and share it to the world with appropriate copyrights in websites such as http://picasaweb.google.com.
While images greatly aid in the identification of taxa, I have not included them in this book for two reasons; it would have significantly increased number of pages (not eco-friendly) and the printing cost (not econo-friendly). What easier way to explain how ecosystems intricately relate to the global economics! I suggest the readers to look-up each taxa presented in this book at http://images.google.com to find photographs for assisting the identification (Activity: 2). However let me warn that some of the photographs in the internet that is crawled by the Google might be wrongly identified and there are no easy way to figure out is it correctly identified or not. A curated list of online identification keys and links to photography sites are available at the Encyclopedia of Life website http://eol.org/collections/108 .
Hope you will enjoy this book and complete the activities to broaden your appreciation of animal biodiversity in India. Comments and suggestions for the improvement are most welcome. Next in this series focuses on plant biodiversity and is expected to come out later this year.
I am from India and what follows is "preface" section of my book which is coming soon, that I would like to improve (as well as my English!) here. Could someone kind enough to hep me out? If style seems very boring (if!) may be an alternative style can be proposed? Any help will be highly obliged!
Preface:
Indian Biodiversity, albeit being one of the richest in the world with three of the 32 “Biodiversity Hotspots”, is unfortunately in a serious sate of neglect from the administration and the general public alike. Four big-sized animals, Pink-headed Duck, Himalayan Mountain Quail, Lesser Indian Rhinoceros and Indian Cheetah, have gone extinct in the last century alone. IUCN enlist India at 7th rank of shame-list, countries struggling to protect its biodiversity. With almost 18% of world population cramming into less than 2% of area, sub-continental forest cover has been steadily shrinking, so as its biodiversity. This report is first of its kind in India, a comprehensive assessment of status and trends of commonly found animals in the subcontinent with its up-to-date taxonomic positions, overview on the systematics, bio-prospecting and conservation. This work also serves as a “binomen dictionary”-for looking up binomial names of virtually every animal species that you might encounter in daily life in India.
The idea to write this book sprang from one of the class assignments as part of BSS.506: Biosystematics and Biodiversity course here at the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda. The assignment was to make a database of Indian Biodiversity. While I appreciate the passion that my students put in the creation of database, most of their entries were well-described taxa from North America and Europe-presumably obtained through online resources, highlighting the dire need to categorize Indian Biodiversity. Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) has published few checklists of animal taxa in India but those did not include several of the important animal phyla. Checklists merely enlist scientific names without common name or any other information and therefore their utility in practical identification is extremely limited. This inspired me to write a book with following focuses:
Limit to the macroscopic extant species that are commonly found in nature throughout the subcontinent.
Species of human importance; a note on bio-prospecting that highlights commercially cultivated/medicinally important/culturally significant taxa discussed in each chapter introduction.
Species of conservation importance; a note on conservation discussed in each chapter introduction and common names are appropriately superscribed throughout (CR: Critically Endangered, EN: Endangered, VU: Vulnerable and NT: Near Threatened.)
Example families and genera covering all iconic metazoan phyla and phylogenetic trees to illustrate evolutionary relationships between them; to aid in understanding and appreciation of animal systematics.
Designated animals representing national and state level administration.
This book is still incomplete; as a privileged reader who appreciates the biodiversity, a column in all the tables are waiting for you to complete; “Name in Regional Language”. With seventeen official languages, India is so linguistically diverse that if I sought out to include a multilingual list of taxa covered in this book, it would have doubled the weight of this book and wasted a number of pages! Instead I made this book like a class-activity notebook; it is for you to find, identify and complete the name in local dialect/regional language in the space provided (Activity: 1). If you have a camera I suggest taking photographs of species that you come across and share it to the world with appropriate copyrights in websites such as http://picasaweb.google.com.
While images greatly aid in the identification of taxa, I have not included them in this book for two reasons; it would have significantly increased number of pages (not eco-friendly) and the printing cost (not econo-friendly). What easier way to explain how ecosystems intricately relate to the global economics! I suggest the readers to look-up each taxa presented in this book at http://images.google.com to find photographs for assisting the identification (Activity: 2). However let me warn that some of the photographs in the internet that is crawled by the Google might be wrongly identified and there are no easy way to figure out is it correctly identified or not. A curated list of online identification keys and links to photography sites are available at the Encyclopedia of Life website http://eol.org/collections/108 .
Hope you will enjoy this book and complete the activities to broaden your appreciation of animal biodiversity in India. Comments and suggestions for the improvement are most welcome. Next in this series focuses on plant biodiversity and is expected to come out later this year.
