In spite of its varied habitat and microclimatic conditions, the province received little attention for pteridophyte enumeration (Singh et al. 2017). The history of studies on the pteridophytes in Uttar Pradesh dates back to the time of Edgeworth (1852) who reported Selaginella bryopteris (L.) Bak from the Banda district of Uttar Pradesh. Thereafter, very few and some finger count contributions by the British workers (Anderson 1859; Edgeworth 1852, 1867; Clarke 1879, 1880; Hope and Trotter 1890) were made (Singh et al. 2017). Prior to the contribution of Chowdhury and Raizada (1954) there was a gap of about 64 years after the contribution by any British worker in 1890. Subsequently, small contributions were made by Indian workers (Chowdhury and Raizada 1954, Roy and Kumar 1959, Ganguli and Roy 1960, Raizada and Chowdhury 1961, Dixit and Tripathi 1966, Kapoor 1962, Varshney 1971, Sharma et al. 1969, Tewari 1973, Chowdhury 1973, Singh 1997; Singh 2002; Khare et al. 2005; Chandra 2000; SAPROF 2007; Dominic Rajkumar et al. 2012, 2013) from time to time including the current geographical boundaries of the Uttarakhand. Before establishing Uttarakhand state in November 2000, a major part of the Himalayas with its tropical-alpine forests was integral to Uttar Pradesh (Singh et al. 2017). Thus there was no clear demarcation between the pteridophytes of these two states, and no comprehensive checklist of the pteridophytes of the current geographical boundary of Uttar Pradesh prior to the contribution made by Singh et al. (2017).
