Digital herbarium for aquatic plants of Delhi
Student name: Ms Aparna Gupta
Guide: Dr Sudipta Chatterjee
Year of completion: 2015
Host Organisation: TERI University
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Dr Sudipta Chatterjee
Abstract: Abstract: the project Digital Herbarium for Aquatic Plants of Delhi provides an insight to the aquatic world of Delhi and what is the current situation of the aquatic plants present in Delhi. Under this project, we selected twelve different sites around Delhi which covered most of the Delhi under the course of six months. From these sites aquatic plants were collected, floating as well as rooted (submerged could not be collected because of security reasons) and phytoplankton. and the same plants were preserved in the form of herbarium and then we have uploaded the result on university website under TERI University Biodiversity Facility portal (TUBIF). Not only these plants were collected but also they were studied with respect to their physical appearance, general traits, taxonomic classification, ecological importance, IUCN status and habitat. All these factors together describe a complete plant in appropriate depth and its environment too. This helped the study to draw various conclusions and raise some important issues like increasing pollution in Yamuna River and how that is affecting aquatic flora and their diversity. Conclusions were drawn accordingly that how are these plants’ current condition in Delhi’s environment and how the increasing pollution effecting their existence. All in all, this study shows that current diversity of aquatic plants in Delhi is not very high and many locations are not accessible which are both not a good thing for a study to be conducted as it leads to altered and inaccurate results.
Key words: Aquatic plants, digital herbarium, ecological importance, taxonomic classification, diversity
