Biological diversity is extremely valuable to humans from an economic standpoint for obtaining the raw materials including food, medicine, building materials and many other elements directly from the resources for maintaining our civilization. Every organism in every ecosystem possesses its own particular ecological function acting as an integral component that influences the overall function and completeness of an ecosystem. Thus a healthy ecosystem will be able to perform comprehensive and high quality ecological services.
Taxonomists around the world have initiated global or local assessment of organisms. All the studies primarily involve species as a unit in the taxonomic hierarchy of classification. Moreover species exists in nature as a visible unit that facilitate in determining various conservation strategies. The total number of species that currently exists on earth is generally considered as a synonymous with the term biodiversity. There is a growing consensus about rapid deletion of species and their habitats due to increasing in human population and human induced anti environmental factors. But the current state of our knowledge about the extent of numerical strength of the species and loss of resources is incomplete. This situation has lead to the introduction of rapid assessment of global biological biodiversity that needs to be conserved.
The present book Plant Diversity and Conservation will serve as an excellent reference material for students and scholars from different fields of botany. The book chapters includes the broad fields like floristic diversity crop wild relatives arborescent flora, weed flora Riparian flora, Endemic plants, ethno-medicinal plants, Chasmophytes, biodiversity assessment, SEM studies, Tissue culture and Phytogeography. |
