SEASONAL VARIATIONS IN DIVERSITY OF AQUATIC MACROPHYTES OF UPPER LAKE, BHOPALPrerna Gupta, Sadhna Tamot, Vinoy K Shrivastava and Rajendra ChakardeAbstract Macrophytes are used as biological indicators of the aquatic environment, allowing detection of ecosystem response to different stressors, i.e. pollution, eutrophication etc. These stressors lead to a reduction in macrophyte diversity and threaten the faunal diversity of aquatic ecosystems favouring the establishment of exotic species, at the expense of native species. To analyse the ecological status of a lake different diversity indexes (IVI, Hâ index) are used which describes the quality of natural areas. The present study was carried out in Behta village to determine the macrophyte species diversity (Hâ index) and importance value index (IVI) in three different seasons. A random sampling was done along several transect line carried out with the help of a 1 m2 light plastic quadrate. During the whole study period, a total of 17 macrophyte species belonging to 12 families and 8 orders were found distributed in the lake. During our observation it has been noticed that out of 17 macrophyte species the Eicchornia crassipes (IVI=16.49) has the highest Importance value index in summer season while the highest Shannon-Wiener Index (Hâ=1.657) was observed during winter season. The diversity of species is not uniformly distributed and showed mosaic of low and high diversity patches. Therefore, this study highlights the loss of species richness and dominance of pollution tolerant species showing that the western part of the lake is severely disturbed during the summer season. |