Application of diversity indices: Insights into ecological perspectives from the Karnataka milch biodiversity exploratories

Policymakers have always been and will also continue to be concerned about food and nutritional security. Among its various sources, the livestock and dairy sector alone contributes a lion's share in global caloric and protein consumption. However, the diversity of livestock, especially of milch animals, has been reported to be threatened in different regions. In addition, biodiversity is often onerous to quantify because of the multitude of indices proposed for this purpose. With this backdrop, an exertion has been made in this study to empirically evaluate the milch diversity in different agro-climatic zones of Karnataka in terms of various indices. Outcomes emanated from this investigation have clearly revealed that among the agro-climatic zones, the northern dry zone and the coastal zone are the most and least biodiverse, respectively. However, among the years, the highest and lowest biodiversity is observed in 2007 and 2019, respectively. On the patterns of biodiversity, the agreement among the agro-climatic zones over the years and vice-versa have also been evident for all the biodiversity indices considered in this study. Despite the strong relationships among these diversity measures, the utilisation of multiple indices instead of any single index is suggested to obtain a better insight into the ecological perspectives.