Exploring and understanding the floristic richness, life-form, leaf-size spectra and phenology of plants in protected forests: A case study of Dachigam National Park in Himalaya, Asia

Abstract Protected areas are contributing people's livelihoods and working as the backbone of all forms of biodiversity conservation. The reformed rules and the legal local protection have come up as a means of conserving trees and associated diversity of life throughout the world. But due to the anthropogenic pressures and climate change especially in the global south and even those within the well-recognized national parks, community conserved forests, wetlands, nature reserves, and similar other species-rich sites are under human pressure. Lots of research works have been carried out related to conservation parameters, still, the qualitative studies on legal protection and management of forest biodiversity in many hotspots regions such as the Himalayas and Indo-Myanmar are lacking. Realising the future perspective of potential and economic valued higher plants in forests, the assessment of species composition of Dachigam National Park (DNP) was carried out in Jammu and Kashmir (JK the majority of the species (62%) had simple leaf lamina. These research findings provide important baseline data for better prediction of phenological shifts associated with Himalayan species over contemporary climate change and species composition of protected areas in Himalaya.