Macrobenthic community of a tropical bay system revisited: Historical changes in response to anthropogenic forcing

Macrobenthic community of an anthropogenically influenced mangrove associated estuary on the East coast of India: An approach for ecological assessment

“…Estuaries are naturally stressed bionetworks that exhibit a high degree of variability in their environmental conditions (Elliott and Quintino, 2007). These highly productive ecosystems have been the focal points for various human activities, of which rapid industrialization and indiscriminate urbanization are accountable for divergent pressures and ecosystem degradation (Lotze et al, 2006;John et al, 2017;Dash et al, 2021). Together with extreme climatic events, unprecedented demands of a rapidly increasing population for space, development, and resources have resulted in changes across global estuaries and started questioning the future of the estuaries (Kennish, 2002;Wetz and Yoskowitz, 2013;Elliott et al, 2019).…”

“…With extended life spans, sedentary lifestyles, and varying thresholds of sensitivity to ambient water/sediment conditions, benthic organisms are excellent bioindicators of prolonged environmental variations, mirrored through fluctuations in species composition and abundance (Veiga et al, 2016;Sany et al, 2018a). Furthermore, the distribution patterns of macrobenthos are susceptible to a wide range of anthropogenic interferences and show spatial and temporal shifts accordingly (Dash et al, 2021). Therefore, studies on the macrobenthic communities are increasingly adopted for assessing the health of the aquatic ecosystems (Mulik et al, 2017;Borja et al, 2019;Mulik et al, 2020a;Mulik et al, 2020b;Pandey et al, 2021;Dauvin et al, 2021;Subramanian et al, 2021).…”

“…The increased loads of municipal and industrial effluents, in amounts higher than the assimilatory capacity of the system, are accumulating pollutants and causing hypoxia-like conditions (Mitra et al, 2018;Mulik et al, 2020a;Kumar et al, 2021). Despite the large deltas with some luxuriant estuarine mangrove cover along the east coast of India (in contrast to the west coast), studies that have looked at the effects of changed environmental conditions on macrobenthic fauna are largely limited (Raut et al, 2005;Ansari et al, 2017;Bhowmik and Mandal, 2021;Dash et al, 2021;Pandey et al, 2021).…”