Species distribution mapping and sustainability measures for a fungus economy in the Indian Himalaya

Abstract

A entomopathogenic fungus, a fungus that kills its host caterpillar to proliferate. This fungus cures a plethora of ailments. It is one of the most expensive natural resources of the world and a resource that emancipated many from poverty in the remote mountains in the Tibetan plateau and the adjoining high altitude areas of Central and Eastern Himalaya. Geographically, a fine resolution information is lacking for majority of its distribution area. We explored a small region Askot landscape in the state Uttarakhand in Western Himalaya in India. The quest culminated in an extensive questionnaire survey with the villagers and harvesters. A current distribution map based on survey and a predicted suitable zone map using MaXent was produced. The concept is based on distributional ecology of a species which cross sections into concepts of species distribution model and ecological niche modelling. The inputs included both abiotic and biotic factos, albiet complexity. After repeated calibration and manual evaluation analysis, we chose elevation, aspect, slope and 12 PCA inputs of 68 MODIS 13Q1 NDVI layers (2012-2013) as the input data. Presence only data distributed as 10 random replicate pairs is used for training data and evalutation. Occurrence data is error free as it is a primary source data. Model evaluation returned a AUC ratio > 1 values for each, indicating that Maxent curve was significantly elevated above the bull expectations. The process of generating a suitability map convinced us of a sustainable harvest approach for safeguarding direct benefit to people's livelihood and indirectly the local environment.