Recent advances in biodiversity and climate change studies in India

Biodiversity is continually transformed by a changing climate. Conditions change across the face of the planet at variable pace leading to rearrangements of biological associations. The carbon cycle and the water cycle, arguably the two most important large-scale processes for life on Earth; depend on biodiversity at genetic, species, and ecosystem levels and can yield feedbacks to climate change. India is no less affected through this feedback mechanism of climate change and had shown its cause and effect association in several studies. In this special issue we present 25 papers contributed by ca 90 authors from India and elsewhere those discuss wide-ranging aspects of biodiversity and climate change. These contributions are based on presentations made at the 2nd International Workshop on Biodiversity and Climate Change (BDCC-2018) held on 24–27-February 2018 at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. The papers are arranged in six sections: Plant (and lichen) Diversity and Climate; Plant Diversity Pattern and Environmental Heterogeneity; Forest Biomass and Carbon; Plant Diversity and Remote Sensing; Species Distribution Modelling; and Animal Diversity, Soil and Biotechnology. Included amongst the contributions are ones using a national database on plant diversity, describing vegetation carbon and biomass sequestration patterns, utilizing remote sensing to assess plant diversity proxies and conservation prioritization, employing species distribution models to analyze climate change scenarios, using acoustics indices for rapid assessment of biodiversity, addressing the soil micro-biome and environmental stress on medicinal plants.