Delineation and Mapping of Ecologically Sensitive Areas and Critical Vulnerable Coastal Areas along the Coast of India

India has large coastal wetlands which cover an area of over 40,230 km2 along its coastline measuring over 7500 km. The coastline is jotted with different sensitive ecosystems like coral reefs, mangroves, tidal mudflats, estuaries, lagoons, marshes and vegetated wetlands. The coastal ecologically sensitive areas are home to a vast biodiversity.

Development of Coastal and Marine Biodiversity Integration Network (CoMBINe)

The Coastal and Marine Biodiversity Integration Network (CoMBINe) is an unique coastal and marine biodiversity web portal that combines multiple databases in a single platform that allows searching the huge wealth of information from multiple, independent, heterogeneous datasets about Indian coastal and marine flora and fauna, housed in biological repositories. The database would include all macro plants (seagrass, mangroves, seaweeds) and animals (Phylum Porifera to Chordata) inhabiting the coastal regulation zone (I to IV) as defined in CRZ 2011 notification.

Impact of large scale cultivation of seaweeds on coastal environment

Commercial cultivation of Kappaphycus alvarezii, an introduced seaweed species is in vogue in Palk Bay, Tamil Nadu since 2003. In the light of the environmental concerns raised on the potential impact of cultivation of this introduced seaweed species on the sensitive ecosystems and the dependence of the coastal community on this sector for their livelihood, this research study has been undertaken with two major objectives viz.,

Inventorisation and database creation on microbial diversity along Indian coast

Investigations of Indian biodiversity records illustrate research gaps in coastal and marine biodiversity and its particularly true in case of microbial diversity. Indian coastal waters are extremely diverse due to geomorphologic and climatic variations along the coastline.