Incense Plants, Their Uses and Diversity in Upper Manang, Central Nepal

Abstract

This study aims to document the incense plants, their uses in other purposes and diversity along different elevation gradients in Upper Manang. The study area is very rich in terms of incense plants. The local people are highly knowledgeable and totally dependent on incense plants. Forty different household were surveyed from which a total of 31 plants were found to be used as incense. These incense plants were also found to be used in other purpose like medicine, fodder, fuel wood etc. Therefore, ethnobotanical study of incense plants was done. The ecological sampling was done an altitudinal gradient of 3200 to 4300 m asl and total of 66 plots (10m×10m) was taken. Latitude, longitude, altitude, aspects and grazing intensity were recorded in each plot. Total 24 incense plant species out of 31 species were recorded from different 66 plots among them 13 were herbaceous and 11 woody species. DCA was used to assess gradient in species composition. Incense species composition was heterogeneous which was reflected by longer gradient length. A Generalized linear model was used to elucidate the pattern of species richness. A quasi-Poison error distribution with F-test was used where the data showed the over dispersion. The incense plants with their life forms were also regressed against the altitude, RRI, and grazing.

Incense species showed a unimodel pattern with altitude whereas woody incense species showed a linear pattern but other life form did not show any significant relationship with altitude. Incense species did not show any relation with RRI but its life form showed linear relationship. A linear pattern of grazing was also observed with incense plants and its different life. Environmental variables play a dominant role to explain the pattern of richness at the local scale.

KEY WORDS: Incense plants, Ethnobotany, Species richness, DCA, GLM