New study tracking pollen from soil of Kaziranga National Park can interpret climate and vegetation change
Cover photo: Map showing the study areas and (b) vegetation coverage
map of Kaziranga National Park (modified after Das et al., 2014).
The research can help the National Biodiversity Mission
New research has developed a modern analogue for pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs
(NPPs) of Kaziranga National Park that can help in the interpretation
of the past vegetation and climate in a region.
Climate change is a dynamic process for the periodic
vegetation shifts in a region. Nevertheless, the national parks are highly
protected areas for the biodiversity conservation. The extreme and
unpredictable weather, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of
natural disasters, is one of the prime drivers for the biodiversity loss in
National Parks. In these circumstances, the precision in future climatic
assessment is important and requires rigorous climate models which are built
utilizing modern and past climatic data inputs which emerged from well-dated
proxy based palaeo-reconstructions. The Kaziranga National Park (KNP) in Assam,
a corridor for immigration of members of the Indo-Malayan fauna into the Indian
sub-region, is a critical reserve for tropical species, having served as a gene
reservoir for these taxa during glacial periods.
With this in mind scientists from Birbal Sahni Institute
of Palaeosciences (BSIP), an autonomous institution of DST have developed a
modern analogue dataset based on pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs) from
different vegetation settings across the Kaziranga National Park of Assam for
the interpretation of the past vegetation and climate in a region. This study
evaluates both the strength and weaknesses of the biotic proxy and assesses how
reliably modern pollen and NPP analogue can identify different ecological
environments and could be used as a baseline in interpreting Late Quaternary
palaeo-environmental and ecological changes more accurately in this region.
Modern pollen analogue being a prerequisite in this high
precipitation tropical region for deciphering the past and future climatic
scenario, the palaeo-ecological data would assist in better understanding the
sustainable future projections in and around the national park.
Compared to single-proxy interpretation, the combination
of pollen and NPP can reveal more detailed information and strengthen
subsequent palaeo-environmental reconstructions. The research is the first
holistic approach towards developing modern pollen and NPP analogue that would
be an accurate reference tool for the past herbivory and ecological studies in
the tropical region of northeast India.
The study published in the journal Holocene for the first
time helps in identifying marker pollen taxa recovered from the surface soil
samples in relation to the different vegetation and land-use from Kaziranga National
Park. It could help public and
wildlife management agencies to understand the association of flora and fauna
especially herbivores in National Parks to conserve it for the current and
future prospect, thus informing the National Biodiversity Mission.