Yashwant S. Rawat

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.

All articles published by MDPI are made immediately available worldwide under an open access license. No special permission is required to reuse all or part of the article published by MDPI, including figures and tables. For articles published under an open access Creative Common CC BY license, any part of the article may be reused without permission provided that the original article is clearly cited. For more information, please refer to https://www.mdpi.com/openaccess.

1. Introduction The Trans-Himalayan zone lies in the shadow of the main Himalayan range and is usually described as a ‘High Altitude Cold Desert’ []. The region remains completely snowbound for months and exhibits extreme climatic conditions, i.e., a temperature range of −45 °C in winter to 40 °C in summer, rainfall < 60 mm, etc.