Talk:Lesser Himalayas (Pakistan)

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Page scope

Lesser Himalayas (Pakistan) is a Growing Region: a named region above Growing Areas. It treats the wild hemp of the hill country of Murree District and of the Abbottabad, Haripur, Mansehra, Battagram and Torghar districts, as Younas and colleagues sampled it in 2023 and as the district flora of Mansehra recorded it in 1993. It holds the growing areas Murree Hills and Kaghan Valley.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Why the region is on the map

Younas and colleagues (2024) name the Lesser Himalayas as one of the two places where they sampled wild hemp, in the same words they use for the Potohar Plateau, and sampled fifteen populations in it in June and July 2023: six in Murree District, four in Abbottabad District, four in Haripur District, and Kohala.
Imtiaz-ul-Haq and Hussain (1993) record the plant as growing wild throughout Mansehra district, which then took in the Mansehra, Batagram and Balakot tehsils.
Kayani and colleagues (2017) collected the plant in the Kaghan Valley in 2012–13.
The region is a tract of wild hemp. None of the sources used here records hemp sown for the drug in it.

Growing status

The status is Active: wild populations were sampled at fifteen places in 2023, and the plant was collected in the Kaghan Valley in 2012–13. No source says the wild growth has ended.

Name and extent

The name is the one Younas and colleagues use for their study area. They take their division of the Himalayan range in Pakistan from Hussain and Ilahi (1991) and Abbasi and colleagues (2015): a Lesser Himalayas of 2,000 to 3,000 m covering the Hazara division, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and Azad Jammu and Kashmir, about 23,295 km². The title carries "(Pakistan)" because the range runs on through India and Nepal.
The region is drawn on part of that zone. Islamabad and Rawalpindi District without Murree are already in the Potohar Plateau growing region, and the Upper Kohistan, Lower Kohistan and Kolai-Palas districts of the Hazara division in Kohistan (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). Azad Kashmir is left out: Younas and colleagues sampled no site in it.
Battagram and Torghar are drawn in so that the region is whole between Mansehra and the Kohistan districts. Battagram was a tehsil of the Mansehra district of the 1993 flora; none of the sources used here names Torghar.

Border

The border follows whole districts as mapped in OpenStreetMap: Murree District (relation 16341589), Abbottabad (16544561), Haripur (16544571), Mansehra (16532697), Battagram (16518108) and Torghar (16528642); about 10,600 km².
The rule that leaves out ground above 4,000 m and land that ESA WorldCover 2021 maps as bare or sparse vegetation, permanent snow and ice, or open water moves the outer edge by less than 0.5 per cent here, so the district line is kept.
Where the line meets the Potohar Plateau and the Kohistan districts, it was fitted to their borders, so that the places meet edge to edge.
The point in the infobox is a point inside the border near its centre.

Accessions and news inside the border

The seed lots from Murree and Shugran in the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System are filed under the region's growing areas.
In the table of Younas and colleagues, the point given for Nathia Gali (34.22° N, 73.72° E) falls in Azad Kashmir, east of the Galyat where Nathia Gali lies; the article names the locality and uses no point from the table. The point they give for Kohala falls just outside Murree District as OpenStreetMap maps it, so neither the region article nor Murree Hills puts Kohala in a district.

Sources

Younas and colleagues (2024). The paper and its Table 1 of localities. One of their 35 sites, Ghazi in Haripur District, is not listed in any of the three clusters in their text, so the article does not place it in one.
Imtiaz-ul-Haq and Hussain (1993). The district description (p. 63) and the entry for Cannabis sativa (p. 70).
Kayani and colleagues (2017). Used for the Kaghan Valley.

Other reports

Before the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1893–94), a zamindar of Multan named the Hazara district among the places where hemp grew spontaneously, and an assistant surgeon serving in Jhang said that it grew wild "in the hills from Murree to Kashmir". Both spoke of places they did not live in, and neither is used.
A 2002 study of the invasive weeds of Abbottabad district lists the plant among them, from the reports of farmers; it gives no place or abundance and is not used.