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by Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu. North by Kollam district and west by Arabian sea. It

is the capital city of Kerala. The whole area is hilly in character and the terrain is highly
undulating and is an assemblage of thick tracts of tropical evergreen forests, small patches of

shola forests, semi evergreen forests, moist deciduous forests, grasslands, wetlands, coastal
areas, monoculture plantations etc. The different habitat contains a mosaic of different forest

types and rich diversity of pteridophytes including many endemic and endangered species.

Field Exploration:

Plant exploration trips were conducted to the different ecological niches and vegetation types
in the study area till ample data on each target species gathered. The ferns are collected for

both herbarium and their germplasm for establishing a field genebank and the voucher
specimens are processed for herbarium. Special considerations were given in the selection of

plants for introducing in terms of their survival in normal climatic condition. Photographs

were also taken to depict each species.

Preparation of Herbarium:

The specimens collected for herbarium were processed according to the International

Standard (Jain and Rao, 1977; Bridson and Forman, 1991). The collected materials for
herbarium were treated with 1:3 mixtures of formaldehyde (37-41%) and water, which kills

the plant. Later these specimens were spread out nearly between the blotting papers and kept

under the plant press. To avoid fungal attack, the dried specimens were poisoned by dipping
in saturated solution of mercuric chloride in ethyl alcohol (25g/l) (Jain and Rao, 1977) and

again placed in blotter for drying out excess solution. After the specimens are pressed, dried
and poisoned, they were affixed on the mounting sheet using fevicol.

Identification:

The collected specimens were critically studied and identified with the help of authentic

taxonomic literature, The Ferns of South India (Beddome, 1864); The Pteridophytic Flora of
Western Ghats-South India (Manickam & Irudayaraj, 1992); Fern flora of Malabar (Nayar &

Geevarghese, 1993) and Fern flora of South India (Nampy & Madhusoodanan, 1998).

Voucher specimens were deposited in the herbarium of the Department of Botany, Iqbal
College, Peringammala, Trivandrum for future reference.

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