This book is the direct outcome of the Mizoram Science Congress 2016, held on 13 and 14 November 2016.

The burgeoning demand on the world food supply, coupled with concern over the use of chemical fertilizers, has led to an accelerated interest in the practice of precision agriculture. This practice involves the careful control and monitoring of plant nutrition to maximize the rate of growth and yield of crops, as well as their nutritional value.

The Himalaya, a global biodiversity hotspot, sustains about one-fifth of the humankind. Nestled within the north-western mountain ranges of the Himalaya, the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) State harbours more than half of the biodiversity found in the Indian Himalaya. The wide expanse of State, spread across the subtropical Jammu, through the temperate Kashmir valley, to the cold arid Ladakh, is typical representative of the extensive elevational and topographical diversity encountered in the entire Himalaya. This book, the most comprehensive and updated synthesis ever made available on biodiversity of the J&K State, is a valuable addition to the biodiversity literature with global and regional relevance. The book, arranged into 7 parts, comprises of 42 chapters contributed by 87 researchers, each of whom is an expert in his/her own field of research. The precious baseline data contained in the book would form the foundation for assessing current status of knowledge about the bioresources, identify the knowledge gaps, and help prioritization of conservation strategies to steer the sustainable use of biodiversity in this Himalayan region. Given the breadth of topics covered under the banner of biodiversity in this book, it can surely serve as a model for documentation of biodiversity in other regions of the world. The book will be of immense value to all those who, directly or indirectly, have to deal with biodiversity, including students, teachers, researchers, naturalists, environmentalists, resource managers, planners, government agencies, NGOs and the general public at large.

For some 50 years, Professor Asakawa and his group have focused their research on the chemical constituents of bryophytes and have found that these plants contain large numbers of secondary metabolites, such as terpenoids, acetogenins, and aromatic compounds representative of many new skeletons, which exhibit interesting biological activities. Individual terpenoids, when found as constituents of both a bryophyte and a higher plant, tend to occur in different enantiomeric forms. Professor Asakawa has covered the literature on bryophytes in two earlier volumes of Progress in the Chemistry of Organic Natural Products, namely, Volumes 42 (1982) and 65 (1995). Since the publication of the latter volume, a great deal of new information has appeared on bryophytes. One example is that known sex pheromones of algae have been discovered in two liverworts, indicating that some members of the latter taxonomic group might originate from brown algae. From information provided in this volume, it is suggested that two orders of the Marchantiophyta should be combined.