Vegetation analysis and environmental indicators of an arid tropical forest ecosystem of Pakistan

[Display omitted] •Interactions between vegetation and environment of the district Jhelum, Pakistan were analyzed.•A total of five significantly different plant associations were observed.•Distance to river was the leading predictor of vegetation compositional variations.•Distance to river as proxy of ground water table depth is more important than rainfall.•Soil pollution and anthropogenic disturbances are disrupting normal ecosystem functioning. Vegetation composition and/or plant species co-existence is influenced by the environmental variations in any region. The ecological knowledge and order of importance of selected environmental variations is important in conservation and management of plant resources. Based on relevant knowledge gap, the study area of district Jhelum, Pakistan lying in an arid-tropical zone was selected to explore the vegetation types and their driving environmental factors by using latest multivariate statistical approaches. For this, the entire district was ecologically explored to collect the natural wild vegetation and environmental data from January 2018 to December 2020. The study area was partitioned into 171 grids (5 × 5 km2). In each grid, three sites were randomly selected (i.e. 513 samples), and subsequently-nine plots were laid at each sampling site (i.e. 1539 plots). Different statistical tests including Monte Carlo permutation test, Indicator Species Analysis (ISA), hierarchical classification, ordination, and variation partitioning were applied to seek the potential number of vegetation types, plant species composition, classification of the studied samples, order of importance of the considered predictors and groups of environmental variables respectively. The findings of this study indicated that all the documented 291 plant species belong to five statistically significant (p