Resilience of the tropical dry evergreen forest in the human-impacted region of Coromandel Coast, India
Résumé
An assessment of the resilience of Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest(TDEF) formation was made using quantitative vegetation andsurface soil pollen surveys in 14 sites around Pondicherry withinthe heterogeneous landscape of the Coromandel coast ofsouthern India. The sites for vegetation and soil surface pollensamples were selected using a stratified random sampling.Vegetation or land cover quantities were measured in quadratswhere 325 angiosperm species representing 75 families ofAngiosperms of the present vegetation were recorded. Therelative densities of species evaluated from three distinct siteshelped to compare them across time, the trajectory of individualspecies and the TDEF itself. The vegetation study indicates thatsome of the TDEF species have the ability to ‘recover’ and adaptto changing conditions and anthropogenic pressures. The studyalso demonstrated the significance of the use of pollen toreconstruct the past land cover.