This nursery/forest restoration manual contains nursery management tips, and provides information on raising 38 important native tropical tree species that are mainly found in the low-elevation tropical forests in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and some parts of Nagaland, Meghalaya. Most of these species would also occur in lower parts of Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura, Sikkim and north Bengal.

The manual also provides some general guidelines/principles of ecological restoration and a discussion on alien/non-native and invasive alien species with a list of some major non-natives that should be avoided for planting. The general guidelines in the manual is adapted from Mudappa & Raman (2010).

There are many more tropical native species that are important and can be raised in nurseries for ecological restoration - for these others, we have included a table that provides the details of fruiting times for 83 species that we have been able to raise in our nursery in Arunachal Pradesh. 

Detailed nursery techniques for some of these species are available in two existing publications by the State Forest Research Institute, Itanagar which are referenced in our manual.

There are limited hard copies available for distribution mainly for Forest Department  and restoration practitioners.

To download a pdf of the manual click here

We hope this manual will be useful for nurseries in North-east India/Eastern Himalayan region to prioritise growing a more diverse set of native tropical tree species for ecological restoration efforts. 

Citation: Datta, A., Borawake, N., Basu, B., Huque, S., Thapa, K., Dako, S., Magar, N., Kino, S., Brah, T. and Magar, K. 2024. Growing native tree species for forest restoration in North-east India: a practitioner’s manual.
Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore. 110 pp. 

Design: Janhavi Rajan

Funded by: Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN)