Forest types of India
Topic: Natural Vegetation and Forests of India · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 5 "Natural Vegetation"
Meaning
NCERT sorts India's forests into five types. It groups them by their main plants and the climate they grow in. The five are: tropical evergreen and semi-evergreen, tropical deciduous, tropical thorn, montane (mountain), and littoral and swamp (coast and wetland) forests. Rainfall mainly decides the type in the plains and plateaus. Temperature, which falls as you go higher, decides it in the mountains. This is why a forest map of India is really a map of rainfall and relief.
Example
The western slopes of the Western Ghats get over 200 cm of rain and have evergreen forest with rosewood and ebony. Western Rajasthan gets under 50 cm and has thorn forest with babool and khejri.
Don't confuse with
- Champion and Seth classification (1968): a much more detailed system with 16 type groups and about 200 sub-types. The Forest Survey of India uses it. NCERT's five types are a simpler version.