This work was supported by the Council of Scientific and Indus-trial Research-University Grants Commission(CSIR-UGC)fellow-ship[221610031949]and the Mohamed Bin Zayed Conservation(MBZ)Fund[240535253].The MBZ grant is funded as part of the Fonseca Leadership Program,which was established by the Global Environment Facility(GEF).The authors are grateful to the CSIR-UGC and the University of Hyderabad for providing facil-ities to carry out the research work.They also thank the forest de-partments of Kerala and Karnataka for granting permission for the fieldwork.The second author would like to thank the CSIR Pool sci-entist scheme for the support and facilities.We are grateful for the support of the ORG.one project of Oxford Nanopore Technologies(ONT)(Kara Dicks),Rufford Grants(45249-1),Idea Wild Grants(Project ID-KJOSINDI0125-00),and Mohamed Bin Zayed Species Conservation(MBZ)Funds in our efforts to conserve threatened trees in the Western Ghats Biodiversity Hotspot Forest regions.Thankful to K.M.G.Gehan Jayasuriya,K Murugesan,Joseph Mappilacherry,Vinayaraj,and Karthikeyan S for providing the photos for the manuscript.The photo plate was made by Amal Thankachan(Lamadesigns). （CSIR-UGC）