Dears, BSI's publication "Plant Discoveries" released on 05th June 2013 quotes the following figures for plant wealth of India: Angiosperms : 17926 Gymnosperms : 74 Pteridophytes : 1267 I think this is latest official.....
Regards, Dr. G. S. Goraya, IFS Deputy Director General (Research) Indian Council of Forestry Research & Education, New Forest P.O., DEHRADUN - 248 006. (Uttarakhand, India) Ph. 0135 - 2757775 (O) Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 16:59:38 +0530 Subject: [efloraofindia:175568] How many flowering plants are in India? From: [email protected] To: [email protected] We all must be grateful to Sir J.D.Hooker, who with his associate taxonomists produced a masterpiece of work published as ‘Flora of British India’ with its jurisdiction as British Indian Empire (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Malayan Peninsula, Bhutan, Tibet etc.). Herein, he described 14,312 species of flowering plants. However, since its publication in 1872-1898, many new species and genera have been added to the flora of present India alone. We, in India are still not able to completely revise Hooker’s masterpiece to produce a national flora while the countries as big and diverse as USSR, China, Australia etc have completed their nation floras and much of the information are available on the web. In fact we all use eFlora China as one of the most reliable taxonomic resource in this forum. The objective of posing this question in subject line is to know the current situation about the number of flowering plants in India. In my lectures in Taxonomy courses it becomes embarrassing to me to say that there are different estimates as variable as 15,000 species (Rao 1994), 16,809 species (Karthikeyan,2000 which I most often quotes), 17,000 species (Khoshoo 1995, Singh et al.2001), 17,500 species (Sharma et al.1997), 18,000 species (Sanjappa et al.2004), 20,247 species (Chowdhery and Murti,2000), and more recently 20,074 (Karthikeyan,2009) etc. Shouldn’t we know in this forum that which number we are chasing for wild flora of India? Since more and more hard core angiosperm taxonomists are also joining this group I am expecting a figure (with reference) which will be recent and reliable. DSRawat Pantnagar -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "efloraofindia" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/indiantreepix. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "efloraofindia" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/indiantreepix. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
