A theoretical investigation of \(\alpha \) -decay half-lives through effective liquid drop model (ELDM) and WKB approximation has been carried out for the nuclei near the r-process termination region with emphasis on thermally excited nuclear states in consistence with astrophysical conditions. For ground-state transitions, the half-lives show good agreement with available experimental data. The analysis over the excited states indicates that the angular momentum plays a dominant role in determining \(\alpha \) -decay half-lives. The decay transition with favorable angular momentum has higher branching ratio and the calculated half-life is close to the experimental data. Further a branching-ratio based approach is employed to obtain an effective half-life, which closely reproduce experimental observations for most nuclei, highlighting the importance of multi-channel decay pathways and provides useful insights into the behavior of nuclei at the termination stage of the r-process.
