Aravalli Regeneration Plan

• 09 Apr 2024

Why in News?

Recently, the Delhi forest department has initiated the establishment of a tissue culture laboratory at the Asola-Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary to conserve rare native trees of Aravalli.

Key Points

• Tissue Culture Laboratory: The lab will be able to extract plant tissue from an in-vitro fully grown plant, generating multiple trees from the same tree.
  • The forest department will take assistance from botanists and scientists from the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) and the Forest Research Institute (FRI).
• The primary goal of the laboratory is to grow endangered native trees in a controlled environment and regenerate saplings of species facing regeneration challenges due to invasive species.
• Tissue culture has proven highly effective in agriculture, particularly with crops such as bananas, apples, pomegranates, and jatropha, offering higher yields compared to traditional farming methods.
• The Aravalli Plan:
  • The regeneration of ridge species like Kulu (ghost tree), palash, doodhi, and dhau is hindered by invasive species, resulting in poor survival rates, with large-scale multiplication achievable only through tissue culture, particularly shoot culture.
  • The lab will also be useful in culturing endangered medicinal plants.

Asola Wildlife Sanctuary

• Asola-Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary is located at the end of an important wildlife corridor that starts from Sariska National Park in Alwar and passes through Mewat, Faridabad and Gurugram districts of Haryana.
• The region has a semiarid climate with notable diurnal temperature variations.
• The vegetation in the Wildlife Sanctuary is predominantly an open canopied thorny scrub. The native plants exhibit xerophytic adaptations such as thorny appendages, and wax-coated, succulent, and tomentose leaves.
• Major wildlife species include Peafowl, Common Woodshrike, Sirkeer Malkoha, Nilgai, Golden Jackals, Spotted deer, etc.