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Rare plateau found by ARI team could hold clues to plant survival amid climate change

Presence of the low-altitude plateau, an isolated flat-topped steep hill, found at Manjare village in Thane district was not known to scientists who have been studying plateau formations and plant species in the Western Ghats for decades now.

The ARI team is also seeking to find if genetics plays a role in the plants’ survival in hostile environments.The ARI team is also seeking to find if genetics plays a role in the plants’ survival in hostile environments.
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Rare plateau found by ARI team could hold clues to plant survival amid climate change
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Scientists at the Agharkar Research Institute (ARI) in Pune have found a rare low-altitude basalt plateau in the Western Ghats, an important discovery they believe could hold the clues to how plant species globally survive climate change.

Presence of the low-altitude plateau, an isolated flat-topped steep hill, found at Manjare village in Thane district was not known to scientists who have been studying plateau formations and plant species in the Western Ghats for decades now.

“The Western Ghats are one of the four global biodiversity hotspots in India. There were so far three known plateau types in the Western Ghats — high altitude laterite plateaus, low altitude laterite plateaus and high-altitude basalt plateaus,” said Dr Mandar Datar, the lead scientist of the study that announced the discovery and was recently published in Springer Nature.

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“We only recently discovered there is a fourth type – the low altitude basalt plateau…”

Dr Datar and his team found 76 species of plants belonging to 24 different families on the low-altitude plateau, some of which are unique to it while others are common among all four plateaus. “It’s a unique model to study how species interact in varying environmental conditions,” Dr Datar said.

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Plateaus are a dominant landscape in the Western Ghats and significant because of the predominance of endemic species. According to Dr Datar, survival of plants in these open, mostly arid habitats is an “important repository of information” on how vegetation can survive in high-temperature conditions, likely to be worsened as climate change continues.

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Unique model

Scientists say the low-altitude plateau at Manjare supports a unique model that can be used to study the survival of plants in varying environmental conditions. This is crucial given that climate change continues to threaten species, including plants, as average temperatures rise globally.

“There are only four months in the year – during the monsoon – which are favourable for plants. So, the plants which grow here only have four-month life cycles. After the monsoons, there is a severe water paucity here and the plants die out. The plants survive in two ways – by seeding just before the end of the monsoon spell or by storing nutrition underground, in the form of bulbs. These plants continue to survive in an extremely hostile environment, with soil temperatures going up to 60 degrees Celsius during the summer months,’’ he explained.

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The ARI team is also seeking to find if genetics plays a role in the plants’ survival in hostile environments. If there is a gene that actually helps these plants, scientists can use it for crop survival, Dr Datar said. “That is why information about these plateaus and plants is crucial,’’ he added.

First uploaded on: 30-01-2023 at 02:45 IST
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