Research Projects

The Himalayan ecosystem is very rich in biodiversity and endemism. The Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) supports an enormous and wide range of flora and fauna and is not only ecologically important but also economically valuable by providing livelihood to local people of that area by providing medicine, food, fuel, etc. The wild bee fauna is threatened and susceptible to extinction with the impacts of anthropogenic pressure, climate change, habitat loss, and excessive use of pesticides. The high land ecosystem of the Northwestern Himalayan mountainous region is still unexplored, and no such baseline data is developed for further monitoring processes, especially in protected and un-unprotected areas. Wild Bees are key pollinators of many wildflowers in the entire Himalayan region and contribute a maximum share to the regeneration and sustainability of forests and the high land ecosystem. Keeping in view, we plan this study to develop the baseline data from the protected as well as unprotected areas in the northwest Himalayas to fulfill the following objectives 1) To enumerate and assess the diversity and distributional patterns of Wild bee fauna in the Union territories of J&K and Ladakh. 2) To study the taxonomy of Wild bee fauna and their pollination attributes in the high land ecosystem. 3) To explore the major threats to the conservation of wild bee fauna. The primary method for the assessment of wild bee fauna will be achieved through a stratified sampling method covering different agroforestry ecosystems of different localities in North West Himalaya. Later on, the required number of transects/quadrats will be laid according to the land use land cover pattern correspondingly based on the study site where the flowers are in the congregation, and sampling will be done in each habitat type in each grid along the elevation zone. Various collecting methods will be approached for sampling different Wild bee fauna. GPS handsets will be used to record the coordinates of different habitat or their range within the study area. To analyze the current status of the Wild bee fauna with special reference to the Union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh in its first phase with long term monitoring for estimating the species diversity, richness and their role in pollination ecology. It is very important to know the species distributional pattern and foraging range of wild bee fauna of Northwest Himalaya. So that, locally adapted species can be protected from environmental changes. With regard to all of these aspects, this project seeks to document the earlier poorly known diversity, elevational gradation, and comprehensive detailed assessment of the current status of wild bee fauna and their associations with entomophilous flowering plants occurring much above the timberline in the highland ecosystem of Northwest Himalaya and their role in the conservation of floral diversity.