Shorea roxburghii

Shorea roxburghii is a species of plant in the Dipterocarpaceae family. It is a tree found in Cambodia, India, Laos, Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Shorea is an important timber genus with most of its species classified as Critically Endangered in the IUCN Red List (IUCN 2011). James & Chan (1991) stated that Shorea species are insect pollinated; a variety of insects have been implicated in its pollination. Shorea species occurring within one habitat and sharing the same insect pollinators, flower sequentially to prevent competition for pollinators (James & Chan 1991). S. megistophylla, an endemic canopy tree species in Sri Lanka has been reported to be pollinated by Apis bees (Dayanandan et al. 1990). Shorea flowers with large yellow elongate anthers have been reported to be pollinated by bees while those with small, white anthers by thrips. Thrips are implicated as pollen vectors for several Malaysian species of Shorea (Appanah & Chan 1981).

In India, the genus Shorea is represented by S. assamica, S. robusta, S. tumbuggaia and S. roxburghii. S. robusta is an anemophile with explosive pollen release pollination mechanism (Atluri et al. 2004). S. tumbuggaia is a Data Deficient (Ashton 1998a) semievergreen tree species restricted to the southern Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. It is anemophilous as well as anemochorous (Solomon Raju et al. 2009). S. roxburghii is a semievergreen Endangered (Ashton 1998b) tree species of peninsular India, which is included in the list of medicinal plants of conservation areas of Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh (Rani & Pullaiah 2002; Jadhav & Reddy 2006).

It is a constituent species of southern tropical dry deciduous forests in the Eastern Ghats (Chauhan 1998) and extends its distribution to dry evergreen or deciduous forest and bamboo forest, often on sandy soils in Burma, Thailand, Indochina and peninsular Malaysia in tropical Asia. It is an important timber and resin source; the latter is used as a stimulant and for fumigation (Ashton 1963, 1982; Anonymous 1985). There is absolutely no information on the reproductive ecology of this species.