Qualitative Assessment of Tree Diversity at College of Agriculture, Bheemarayanagudi Campus, Northeastern Karnataka, India

Plant diversity makes India one of the megabiodiverse countries in the world. But mankind has been exploiting plants for food and medicinal purposes since time immemorial. The vast number of plant species occupying the earth shows large diversity with respect to their habit, habitat, structure, function and life span. A Study was conducted to enumerate the tree diversity of plants of the College of Agriculture, Bheemarayanagudi campus during the year 2023-24. The whole campus was visited many times and collected information about the type of plants, their abundance and plants were identified based on the literature cited. The college campus has a total of 1678 no. of individuals of trees belonging to 52 species, 47 genera and 23 families. The maximum number of tree species has been recorded in Azadirachta indica A. Juss. (741) Simarouba glauca DC. (118), Pongamia pinnata (L.) Pierre. (109), Tectonagrandis L.f. (96), Cassia siamea Lam. (68), Monoon longifolium (Sonn.) B.Xue & R.M.K.Saunders, (68), Santalum album L. (53), Albizia lebbeck (L.) Benth. (45), Ficus lacor Buch-Ham. (43) and Roystonea regia (Kunth) O.F. Cook (43), etc. The results found that Meliaceae, Fabaceae, Simaroubaceae, Lamiaceae, and Moraceae were the dominant families. The campus has 2 endangered and economically important medicinal plants, such as Swietenia Mahagoni (L.) Jacq., and Tecoma undulata (Sm.) G.Don. and 01 vulnerable Santalum album L. species. The rationale of the present work is to document the tree species of each tax with scientific information about the campus.