Medicinal plants diversity modelling using remote sensing & GIS technology of Chilkigarh, West Bengal, India

The present study integrates Remote Sensing, GIS and ground survey to study the floristic composition of medicinal as well as herbal plants within and around Chilkigarh village; the major fascination of Chilkigarh, West Bengal, India. The Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) layers of land use and land cover (LULC), and plants species location interpolated were created using thematic functions in Arc GIS software. The relationship between the landuse and medicinal plant species were implemented to explore the plants modeling both spatial and non-spatial data under the GIS platform. The forest is covered with 184 medicinal plant species under 155 genera, distributed among 56 plant familes under the division Mono-cotyledons and Di-cotyledons. Our checklist represents some dominating families likeFabaceae (16), Poaceae (13) Asteraceae (13), Euphorbiaceae (13), Malvaceae (11), Apocynaceae (10), Araceae (9), Acanthaceae (8), Solanaceae (7). Rubiaceae (6), Verbenaceae (6) among the 184 species, presented checklist includes herbs (98), shrubs (33), trees (34), climbers (18) and epiphyte (1). Finally, the medicinal plant’s information as a geographic database determination assists the conservation prioritization, methodical documentation, continuous monitoring and safeguard the forest from anthropogenic activities of the plant species.