Dhaval C. Vyas and Hetal K. Panchal
Abstract
Soil is likely to contain billions of microorganisms (Soil microbial flora). They give mechanical and nutritional support to higher plant by formation of soil, fixing atmospheric nitrogen and degrading complex organic matter into simple compounds. Therefore, study of soil microbial flora gives impactful insights about overall health and plant diversity of the given ecosystem. Field-based biodiversity enumeration/ estimates of Soil microbial flora using traditional methods cover smaller regions of forest cover. Execution of these studies for larger areas of forest cover is time consuming and cost prohibitive. Providentially, plants and microorganism are highly reliant on each other (both physiologically as well as physically). In present study significant relationship were found between measured soil microbial flora and plant diversity in deciduous forest ecosystem (R2 ? 0.70). Consequently, established association is exploited in developing accurate models (Validation RMSE ? 10%) to measure and map diversity of microorganisms using hyper spectral remote sensing.