Archives of Current Research International

Restoration of reactivated sand dunes in hot-arid environments is challenging because plant establishment is constrained by highly variable rainfall, intense evaporative demand, aeolian disturbance and recurrent biotic pressure. This study assessed short-term vegetation change in a protected and restored reactivated dune at Udasar, Bikaner district, Rajasthan, within the Indian Thar Desert. Plant communities were surveyed in 2023 and 2024 in a protected/plantation field (PF) and an adjacent outside protected field (OPF), using 15 sampling quadrats per stratum in each field and year. PF and OPF were single field areas rather than independently replicated treatment units; consequently, their contrasts are interpreted as site-level comparisons and not as replicated treatment effects. Trees, shrubs and herbs were evaluated separately, and species richness, density, frequency, abundance, importance value index (IVI), Shannon diversity, Simpson diversity, Pielou evenness and Margalef richness were quantified. Pooled species richness in PF increased from 15 species in 2023 to 25 species in 2024 (+66.7%), whereas OPF increased from 10 to 12 species (+20.0%). In PF, Shannon diversity increased from 0.737 to 1.133, Simpson diversity from 0.293 to 0.462, and Pielou evenness from 0.272 to 0.352. Most of the increase occurred in the understorey: shrub richness rose from four to seven species and herb richness from nine to sixteen species. Ten additional taxa were recorded in the 2024 PF survey, while all taxa recorded there in 2023 were recorded again in 2024. The herb layer also underwent substantial compositional change, with dominance shifting from Cenchrus ciliaris in 2023 (IVI 180.9) to Aristida depressa in 2024 (IVI 141.1). Quadrat-level comparisons identified a significant PF-OPF difference in shrub abundance in 2024 after false-discovery-rate correction, but these tests characterise sampled-unit differences within the two field areas rather than treatment-level causal effects. Herb abundance also increased significantly in OPF between years, showing that year-to-year environmental conditions affected vegetation beyond the protected field. Taken together, the observations are consistent with short-term vegetation recovery and biodiversity enhancement within the protected/plantation field, while not isolating the separate effects of fencing, plantation and climatic variability. Recruitment of arid-region-adapted taxa, including Lasiurus sindicus, Citrullus colocynthis and Arnebia hispidissima, is consistent with development of a more structurally diverse psammophytic community with potential relevance to dune stabilisation.