Insect biodiversity in India

Abstract

The Indian region is recognized as one of the major centres of biodiversity in the world. That the diversity is equally rich at the ecosystem level and at the species level has been well documented by field work carried out by naturalists and professional field biologists during the past 200 years. The habitat diversity offered by alpine ecosystem to mangrove ecosystem through a wide range of tropical forest ecosystem, freshwater and marine ecosystem, desert and island ecosystem found expression in richness of faunal elements in all groups. Today India, occupying 2 percent of global space (Ghosh, A.K. 1990, 1994), documents nearly 7 percent of global faunal diversity. In Phylum Arthropoda, India has 6.13 percent of total species recorded so far in the world (60,383 species out of 98,3744) (ZSI, 1991).