Reassessment of endemic angiosperm genera in India

Abstract

 This paper reassesses the current status of endemic genera after about a decade. Earlier Irwin and Narasimhan (2011) reported 49 genera as endemic to India. Later, Singh et al. (2015) have reported 58 endemic genera for India. We, in this paper, based on extensive scrutiny of literature and online resources, report a total of 46 genera as endemic to the political boundary of India. An analysis of the phytogeographical distribution of these genera confirms our earlier inference, except for minor variations in numbers of endemic genera in Peninsular Indian and Himalayan regions. The life form analysis shows that nearly three fourth of the endemic genera are herbaceous which occur predominantly in wet evergreen and grassland vegetation. In spite of their endemic nature, IUCN assessment at the global level has not yet been done for most of the species of these genera even though this gap was mentioned a decade earlier by Irwin and Narasimhan (2011).