Haripriya, Anshu Rana, Aseesh Pandey and ID Bhatt

For millennia, medicinal plants have safeguarded humanity, with their traditional uses dating back to the earliest civilisations. In recent decades, however, a surge in global commercial demand for medicinal plants has led to over-exploitation, illegal trade, unsustainable habitat, and fragmentation, threatening these invaluable biological resources at serious risk. Therefore, the conservation of medicinal plants can be viewed as a microcosm of broader plant conservation and ecosystem protection efforts. The Himalaya is a storehouse of biodiversity, providing habitats for various rare, endemic, threatened, and medicinal plant species. The Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), which spans 13 Himalayan states in the country, contains 1748 species of medicinal use. Of these, 1127 species belonging to 153 families have been recorded from the Uttarakhand state…read more on NOPR