Biodiversity of Piper in South India – application of GIS and cluster analysis

Abstract

Sixteen Piper species, including P. nigrum, have been collected from the 483 sites, majority from Western Ghats and maintained at the Indian Institute of Spices Research, Calicut. Fifteen qualitative morphological characters of 16 wild species of southern India were studied and plotted for the hierarchical clustering, using SPSS software. The cluster groups were compared using BIOCLIM model of DIVA-GIS to identify the areas or ‘niches’ where Piper species occur predominantly. A grid of 50 ´ 50 km cells and a circular neighbourhood with a radius of 50 km to assign points to grid cells was used to map species richness and species diversity. The highest richness grid was found to have 15–16 species, while the highest diversity value was found to be 1.8 to 3.