Nepal's biodiversity at a glance

The tallest mountain range in the world, the Himalaya is also a youngest and is still growing. This range deprives the great Tibetan plateau from monsoon and forms the rain shadow. And on the other hand it also blocks the cold northern winds reaching the Indian plains during winter. Because of these phenomena the southern parts of the Himalaya is lush green, productive and prone to erosion due to full brunt of monsoon, whereas the northern Tibetan plateau remained arid region. This uniqueness in the climate found due to altitudinal variation allows Nepal to experience from Tropical to Alpine bio-climate, despite our geographical position. Hence Nepal boasts from the large terrestrial rhinos and elephants of the tropics to the snow leopard and Tibetan Argali of alpine region. Nepal has been ranked top ten highest flowering plant diversity out of 25 Asian countries. On a world scale Nepal lies 27th in the richness scale on floral diversity. With just over 0.1% of the earths land surface occurring in Nepal, it supports globally known 4.2% butterflies (635 spp), 2.2 % of fresh water fish species (185 spp), 1.1 % amphibians (43 spp.), 1.5% reptile (100 spp.), 8.5% of birds (860 spp.) and 4.2% mammals (181 spp).

Nationalparks, conservstion areas and wildlifereserve

There are many conservation areas and national parks made in Nepal. Such parks and conservation areas are made to save the animals and plants being rare.The geography of Nepal can be divided into high mountains, mid hills and low lands. A wide range of ecosystem from sub-tropical jungles of the Terai to the arctic conditions of Himalayan highlands are found within an area of 147,181 square kilometers. There are a total of 9 National parks, 3 wildlife Reserves, 3 Conservation Areas, 1 Hunting Reserve including 9 Buffer zones around national parks, covering a total of 28,585.67 km2 (19.42%) of the country’s total land. Nepal’s rich bio-diversity renders it ideal as an eco-tourism destination.

Butterflies

Nepal is very rich in forest resourse therefore Nepals consist many different types of species of butterflies. Nepal houses excellent representation of butterflies found both in Oriental and Palaearctic realms. The total diversity of butterfly reported so far comprises about 650 species out of 20000 species found in the world. All these species are categorized under 11 families of the existing 15 families in the world. About 29 species and subspecies have been found endemic to the country.