Umaisar Gull Ganie
Srinagar, Oct 14: Having 6,000 specimens present in it, the herbarium of Centre for Biodiversity and Taxonomy in the Department of Botany at Kashmir University has been declared as 3rd largest in North-western Himalayas by New York-based International Bureau for Plant Taxonomy and Nomenclature under the acronym KASH.
Akhtar H Malik, Curator of the Herbarium, said, “KASH is acronym of our herbarium and this year, we have crossed the mileage of sixty thousand spacemen, which have been collected by different scientists and botanists from last 60 years from far-off areas of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh.”
“It is plant heritage of both Union Territories and there are some herbarium specimens in the world, which are more than 400-year-old and in our herbarium, there are some specimens, which have been collected by British botanists, which are more than one century old,” he said.
He said that any person, who is interested in the plant wealth of the area, can come to the herbarium and see these specimens. “There are around 1-2 thousand specimens, which are endangered and these specimens can prove a last resort for their restoration,” Akhtar said.
He said that this herbarium was started with just 500 specimens in 1975 and every year more and more specimens are added to it and this year they have reached to 60,000 specimens.
He further said that in coming five years, they are expecting to cross one lakh specimens.
