Abstract

Forest type of any given area is a manifestation of total ecological set up of that area. For preparing a blueprint for conservation of biota, one of the essential steps is cataloguing all identifiable ecosystems occuring within the region. Since the plant communities being primary producers reflect the basic characteristics of the physical environment and also in turn decide the identity of the consumers viz. the animals. The forest types of Kerala show overlapping pattern. In all the earlier studies in this area a broad categorisation of forest types like, evergreen, moist deciduous etc. alone have been done (Suraj et al., 1997 and menon, 1993) . In the present study the forest type classification of Peppara Wildlife Sanctuary was done using 1: 15, 000 black and white aerail photographs by Visual interpretation techniques. microlevel stratificcation of forest types were achieved. West coast tropical evergreen forest and Hilltop evergreen forest were separately