Northern Regional College

Gentiana kurroo Royle (Gentianaceae) is a critically endangered, highly medicinal, and endemic species of the Western Himalaya, with a restricted distribution in India, Pakistan and Nepal. This study focuses on ex-situ mass propagation and in-situ conservation through reintroduction under a species recovery initiative. Macropropagation was achieved via seed germination and vegetative division of the tufted rhizomes, while micropropagation was carried out through axillary bud proliferation in Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium. In vitro raised plantlets were successfully acclimatized in a glasshouse and subsequently transferred to the open environment, achieving an 83% survival rate. Under the reintroduction program, propagated plantlets were introduced into three wild habitats in the Chakrata and Mussoorie Forest Divisions of Uttarakhand, with 44% survival after six months. The study demonstrates the successful integration of ex-situ propagation with in-situ conservation, providing a viable approach for germplasm preservation and addressing the increasing medicinal demand for G. kurroo.

Efficient and verifiable autonomous herbicide application on municipal pavements remains a persistent challenge, with conventional blanket spraying causing unnecessary chemical use and existing selective systems relying on costly non-imaging sensors with limited coverage. This paper therefore presents a low-cost embedded dual-band (660/850 nm) vision system for real-time weed detection and spraying, designed for deployment on municipal maintenance vehicles. The system is evaluated using three field datasets and through an exhaustive grid search, it was identified that with a lightweight local-adaptive thresholding pipeline using Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) the system could achieve an averaged F1-score of 0.78 while operating at 20 fps on Raspberry Pi hardware. Crucially, this detection performance reduces herbicide use by 64.9%. The method also maintains a low missed-weed rate of 4.35%. These results demonstrate that significant chemical savings and reliable activation behaviour can be achieved using an interpretable, computationally lightweight vision approach, enabling scalable precision spraying for municipal roadside vegetation management.

According to the Art. 53.1 of Madrid Code , three replacement names, viz. Artemisia timoshinae , A. inderensis and A. razmyslovae , are proposed here to replace the following illegitimate later homonyms published by Timoshina in 1973: A. minuta (non Rydberg, in 1916), A. elegans (non Salisbury, in 1796), and A. tenuis (non Rydberg, in 1900).

Two very little known Cheilolejeunea species in India, viz., Cheilolejeunea eximia (Jovet-Ast & Tixier) R.L.Zhu & M.L.So and Cheilolejeunea osumiensis (S.Hatt.) Mizut. are reported here for the first time from Meghalaya. Of which, the former was earlier known in India from Arunachal Pradesh only, while the latter from Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim. Description of both the species with notes on habitat, distribution and SEM details are provided in present communication.

Bentham in the year 1881 described a monospecific climbing bamboo genus Melocalamus. After hundred years later in 1983 the second species M. elevatissimus Hsueh & Yi was described from Tibet. At present its 15 species and one variety known from the world, three species from India. The genus was later merged with Dinochloa Buse. However, at present both are considered distinct. A species Dinochloa macclellandii initially described on vegetative characters which was subsequently transferred under Melocalamus and a combination Melocalamus macclellandii (Munro) Naithani was proposed. The present paper discusses the identity of M. macclellandii. Distinguishing characters for the genera have been provided, the epithet Melocalamus macclellandii (Munro) Naithani has been retained. Colour photographs, illustration and descriptions of the floral parts have now been provided for the first time.