Recent Trends of Ecosystem Health and Biodiversity Status of Pelagic-Benthic Coupled System in Indian Estuaries with Special Emphasis on Hooghly Estuary, India

An Ecosystem can be defined as a community of interconnected elements comprising of living (biotic) and nonliving (abiotic) components of their surrounding environment interacting with each other. Among different types of ecosystems, estuarine system is of interest because the most sensitive land-water-atmosphere interactions are pronounced at these regions. It provides diverse habitat for wide variety of aquatic resources of ecological and economic significance including finfish, prawn, bivalve, gastropod, fiddler crab and plankton and so on. But recent years have seen gradual degradation of estuarine ecosystem, mainly in coastal landscape of India, owing to the different anthropogenic factors such as overfishing, development of agriculture and sewage from aquaculture farms, expansion of human settlements. These hamper the ecological balance affecting the food web of the concerned systems. It may lead to impacts including extinction of species, alternation of species diversity of different trophic levels, declination of mean trophic level within the system and significant habitat modification or destruction. Beside this, it also affects the social and economic wellbeing of the coastal communities. So it is important for us to know about recent trends of Indian estuarine ecosystems biodiversity and their proper sustainable management in future. For this purpose, understanding of how ecosystems are structured and how they function is much necessary and ecosystem health analysis is a more scientific and appropriate approach than any other ecological studies. So, our study emphasizes on three major aspects: (1) current scenario of ecosystem heath and biodiversity of Indian estuaries at both temporal and spatial scales; (2) Importance of Hooghly estuary and associated modelling studies (3) The necessary actions required for improvement of their ecosystem health status.