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Floristic and taxonomic community may miss out certain species from their surveys resulting in treating them under threatened categories based on dearth of representations in collections. However, such plants are likely to be recognized adequately by traditional knowledge if these plants have some known utilities. Knowledge about plant resources with forest dwelling human communities is a key constituent of their traditional knowledge, and harnessing natural resources sustainably has been a part of their lifestyle for centuries. We discuss here an example of a grass Dichanthium jainii(Deshp. & Hemadri) Deshp., endemic to Sahyadri, Northern Western Ghats, which is placed under threatened plant category Endangered (EN) owing to its underrepresentation in collections. However, the plant is used by local inhabitants of Northern Western Ghats as a roof thatching material for many generations. This grass is not only conserved by them in situ, but also planted for domestic use by every household. The paradoxical situation of its threat status, based on herbarium studies, and its much larger extent of occurrence in reality, is a result of overlooking traditional knowledge in taxonomic surveys. This paper appeals that traditional knowledge can also be taken as one of the sources while reassessing status of threatened plants.

Rock outcrops are unique habitats in terms of their geological and ecological specializations, soil availability, water seasonality, and environmental extremes. These habitats have attracted the attention of many researchers worldwide in the last few decades. Indian rock outcrops spread throughout the country with more concentration in the Western Ghats region, supporting many endemic and unique habitat specialist species. Despite Indian outcrops having become hotspots for novel species discoveries in recent times, ecological studies on them are still in their infancy. In the present review, we discuss studies, research gaps, and the scope for future investigations on Indian outcrops. We also compare outcrop studies across the world with the Indian systems in order to understand their uniqueness and peculiarities. Literature and observations revealed the presence of 390 taxa on rock outcrops of the Western Ghats with various adaptive traits such as desiccation tolerance, succulence, carnivory, and geophytism, a trend common to most of the tropical outcrops. The dominance of Poaceae endemics, large extents of monocotyledonous mats, and underrepresentation of succulence are unique features of Indian rock outcrops. In the light of various disturbances, faced by Indian outcrops, further studies that would lay a foundation on which conservation strategies can be formulated are a want of time.

Rock outcrops are habitats possessing large areas of exposed bare rock and extreme environmental conditions. In the biodiversity hotspot of Western Ghats, three types of rock outcrops are known: lateritic outcrops at high (HLF) and low altitude (LLF), and basalt outcrops at high altitudes (BM). Apart from these types, one study mentioned the possibility of a fourth rare type: low altitude basalt outcrop. However, previous studies did not report occurrence of such an outcrop. In this study, we report a low altitude basalt outcrop (Manjare, Maharashtra), document its vegetation and compare it with the other three types of outcrops. We recorded 76 taxa belonging to 24 families. Families Poaceae, Leguminosae and Cyperaceae were species-rich. Vegetation comparison with the other three outcrop types revealed that maximum species (76%) were shared with LLF, followed by HLF (62%) and BM (59%). A cluster analysis based on species occurrence using the Sørensen dissimilarity index showed that the Manjare outcrop separates from high altitude outcrops (HLF and BM) at the first level and from LLFs at the second level. Manjare supports a unique combination of species composition from HLF, LLF and BM, which offers a system to study species interactions and their relationship with the environment.

Ephemeral rock pools are a characteristic type of aquatic habitat formed on the rock outcrops throughout the world, which harbor unique flora and fauna. Due to their structural simplicity and small size, rocky pools form a unique model ecosystem for studying how local environmental parameters shape aquatic vegetation. We studied the species-environment associations between the aquatic flora of the rock pools from the Western Ghats of India to understand whether species occurrence is influenced by the environmental parameters and whether we can predict the species occurrence using environmental variables. Sixty-one rock pools from 26 rock outcrops occupying different altitudinal gradients of the northern Western Ghats were sampled along with their physical properties and chemical characteristics. Canonical correspondence analysis suggested that altitude, latitude, magnesium, sulphate influenced species occurrence in rock pools. Replacement of species belonging to genus Eriocaulon across the altitudinal gradient was observed. Analysis of Covariance showed that most of the species are influenced by altitude while for few species both altitude and baserock were important. Application of various supervised learning procedures suggested that Random Forest was the most efficient method to predict species occurrence based on environmental parameters of rock pools. Decision trees based on Random Forest classification showed that multiple environmental factors including physical and chemical parameters of rock pools simultaneously influenced the species occurrence in the rock pools of the Western Ghats.

Masks save lives. Therefore, while the culture of wearing masks is promoted, it is critical to understand the various aspects of how that culture is adopted. The main contribution of this paper is in the modeling of the mask game. Wearing a mask provides partial protection against epidemics at some cost of comfort. Players can be differentiated according to both their risk state as well as their health state (susceptible, infected and removed). We formulate the problem as a Bayesian game in which players know their own risk state and ignore their own health state and the health and risk states of their counterparts. Using ideas from evolutionary games, we reduce the problem to a one-shot equivalent game and describe the structure of the symmetric equilibria. We prove that the policies adopted by the players at such equilibria admit a threshold structure. More specifically, players wear masks only if their risk state is equal to or bigger than a given threshold.

Hill forts of Northern Western Ghats offer an interesting mix of man-made and natural habitats and as a result shelter a great diversity of endemic and threatened plants. Strict protection of certain areas and selective interference for strategic reasons on hill forts are responsible for maintenance of large protected populations of local endemic species. This has also created special patterns of plant distribution. In recent years, many novelties have been described from forts. Though hill forts have gained importance from the historical and archeological point of view, they are seldom considered as biodiversity conservatories. We suggest here that while prioritizing conservation areas in Northern Western Ghats, hill forts should be given a status of local biodiversity hotspots and conservation should be provided to all microhabitats that are natural as well as man-made. This will assure protection of endemic and threatened species of Western Ghats as well as local endemics of Northern Western Ghats.

We model the competition over several blockchains characterizing multiple cryptocurrencies as a non-cooperative game. Then, we specialize our results to two instances of the general game, showing properties of the Nash equilibrium. In particular, leveraging results about congestion games, we establish the existence of pure Nash equilibria and provide efficient algorithms for finding such equilibria.