In the present paper we present JHK photometric results of the young embedded cluster NGC 2316 .
We construct the cluster radial profile from which we determine a radius of 0.63 pc .
We find 189 \pm 29 cluster members in an extinction limited sub-sample of the survey , 22 \pm 19 of which are possibly substellar .
An average extinction of 4.5 visual magnitudes is derived using ( H - K ) colours of control fields .
This extinction is due to the presence of residual parental molecular cloud .
NGC 2316 presents 16 % source fraction of excess emission which is consistent with other results from clusters with an age of 2 – 3 Myr .
This age is consistent with the distribution of sources in the colour-magnitude diagram when compared to theoretical isochrones , and the overall shape of the cluster KLF .
The substellar population of the cluster is similar or smaller than that observed for other embedded clusters and the stellar objects dominate the cluster membership .