A brief account of Orchidaceae in Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai, India

revising the Flora of Bombay Presidency added 29 new species to T. Cooke’s Orchidaceae list. Fernandez (1951–1954) studied monocotyledons while Shah (1960) assessed the sea-shore and monsoon flora of Salsette Island. Santapau & Kapadia (1966) studied the Orchids of Bombay (then Presidency). Forty-three years later the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) published the Flora of Sanjay Gandhi National Park (2005) which listed 22 species mostly on the authority of other botanists, viz., E. Blatter, H. Santapau, Z.J. Kapadia, G.L. Shah, R.R. Fernandez, P.S. Herbert, Dalzell & Gibson and C. McCann. We undertook this work to update the current status of orchids in the national park. Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) is one of the six national parks in the state of Maharashtra (Mathur 1997), earlier known as Krishnagiri National Park and now popularly known as Borivali National Park. It is the ‘only’ protected area in the Mumbai metropolitan area. The park comprises an area of about 103.36km2 and lies A brief account of Orchidaceae in Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai, India

between 19 0 8'-19 0 21'N & 72 0 53'-72 0 58'E (Khawarey 2000). The limits of the national park are demarcated by Nagla block in the north, Yeoor range in the north-east, Bhandup in the east, Borivali in the west and Goregaon in the south which suggests that most of the park area is surrounded by the metropolitan city of Mumbai. A few elevated areas are assigned to this protected area due to the spur of the northern Western Ghats.
The forest type is represented by a tropical moist deciduous forest with patches of tropical semievergreen forest at higher altitudes (Champion & Seth 2005) with moist teak bearing forest, southern moist mixed deciduous forest, mangrove scrub and west coast semi-evergreen forest as the sub-types . These forests play an important role in harbouring 15 species of orchids. The terrestrial orchid species are mostly found in open forest patches while the phorophytes like Tectona grandis, Terminalia crenulata and so on are home to epiphytic taxa.

Results
The authors Kumar et al. 2001;Jalal & Jayanthi 2012) and most of the species face threats on a larger scale, due to habitat loss or fragmentation, human interference and so on.

Discussion and Conclusion
Studies on the Bombay Presidency have been done since the 1830s. In the course of 175 years, the geographical boundaries of Mumbai District have become smaller. Sanjay Gandhi National Park is onefifth of the city area. Various locations from the National Park have neither been studied nor mentioned in the publications. The authors have taken efforts to visit various trails/locations inside the National Park. Fifteen species were documented, of which, eight are epiphytic and seven are terrestrial.
Referring to earlier records, species like Aerides ringens and Cymbidium aloifolium are doubtful The presence of seven endemic orchids depicts a very high conservation value of this national park and hence these orchids along with their habitat need to be conserved.