Respected Oudhia Sir Thanks a lot for the response. Coming to your queries. The study area was whole of Jharkhand We used Stratified Random Sampling. Stratification was done on the basis of presence of more than 10 orchids in the region and the habitat, i.e., sampling was done exclusively in those areas where we had more than 9 orchids.
1. In the present article I didnt talk about the vegetation composition of each of the 5 habitats. 2. When you do random sampling you are likely to miss species of orchids as well as host trees, as you can see out of 11 had only 7 species in the plots. 3. Pterocarpus marsupium was undoubtedly there, but I never found orchid in it, and I never found so much of it in the plot, i.e., it was not as dominant as other tree species to classify a habitat on its basis. Infact acording to my findings, orchids were present in the areas were sal is (w.r.t.) more than 9 orchids. How did I chose.9 orchids? I made some preliminary survey and found the most common ones which were around 9 in numbers. 4. On Terminalia chebula I did find some orchids, but no Dendrobiums and this tree was also not as dominant as the other counterparts in a habitat. Some Vanda tessellata, V. testaceae, Aerides multiflora, if I remember correctly I found on this. 4. Yes, I never found an epiphytic orchid in Shorea - terminala alata forests. This doesnt mean, that I didnt find epiphytic orchids on Shorea or T. alata (I did find them) but not in an area where these trees formed the major vegetation, in my area, may be because they were too dense. 5. When you do random sampling, you have to maintain the ramdomness otherwise you cant calculate the densities and abundance accurately. 6. To prove that, I used species area curve to check if my sampling effort was adequate, and frankly speaking in all the habitats yes the curve saturated much before my last plot. I really appreciate posting your queries. Regards Pankaj
