Author(s)

Arumugam Nagarajan¹, Saravanan Soorangkattan², Kavitha Thangavel³, Boobalan Thulasinathan³, Jothi Basu Muthuramalingam², Arun Alagarsamy^3*

¹Under Graduate Lab, Department of Biotechnology, Bhupath and Jyoti Mehta School of Biosciences, Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, Chennai, India.
²Department of Botany, School of Life Sciences, Alagappa University, Karaikudi, India.
³Department of Microbiology, School of Life Sciences, Alagappa University, Karaikudi, India.

The floristic diversity of plants and their abundance were analyzed in 2.5 km campus to explore their medical importance by random sampling. The results for plant diversity in IIT-M campus showed nearly 100 species of flowering plants, with genera belonging to nearly 40 families. The most dominant family in the present study is Fabaceae with 15 species (25%) of the medicinal trees. In addition, the dominant medicinal herbs belong to the families of Acanthaceae, Apocynaceae, Fabaceae and Rubiaceae containing 4 species (12%) each. The identified medicinal tree and herb are verified with Red data book to explore their conservation status of every identified medicinal trees and herbs. On comparison with the existing IUCN red data list, the conservation status of 73% of trees and herbs identified in the present study were not assessed. Also, the biodiversity of plants focused on ethano-botanical aspects to reveal their medicinal uses.

Medicinal Plants, Medicinal Tree, Plant Diversity, Ethano Botany

Nagarajan, A. , Soorangkattan, S. , Thangavel, K. , Thulasinathan, B. , Muthuramalingam, J. and Alagarsamy, A. (2017) Campus-Wide Floristic Diversity of Medicinal Plants in Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M), Chennai. American Journal of Plant Sciences, 8, 2995-3012. doi: 10.4236/ajps.2017.812203.