 very warm. Good morning. And good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening for people coming, people joining us from various parts of the globe. And it's a wonderful day to begin again. So we had a wonderful sessions yesterday. And it's very exciting to start another day afresh. And with a, in fact, unlike last yesterday, it was a very focused discussion. And today we have a very wide variety of speakers and wide variety of topics lined up for an exciting sessions. And just to give a brief background about the today's webinar, today, the theme of the webinar is, as you can see from the background, mangroves for coastal resilience and wider city conservation. The idea behind conceiving this team is to get some contemporary ideas regarding, you know, management of mangroves and conservation issues around mangroves, as well as the reason the research that are happening on mangrove ecosystems, especially in the ecosystem or ecological aspects. So we have a lot of studies done on these aspects. However, there are so much of, as yesterday highlighted by some of the panelists, as well as the keynote speaker, there are quite a lot of interesting studies that that yet to be done, as far as Indian mangroves are concerned. So you could see that today we have a, like I said, very wide variety of topics. And we hope we will have a very interesting sessions. And I thank everybody for joining us. And today we have with us, Dr. Shivakumar, it's a honor to have you in the webinar. And so without further ado, I'd like to invite him to deliver the welcome address. So just a brief introduction about Dr. Shivakumar. He's one among the, you know, hardcore conservationists in the country. And he is a fact, he is a scientist F at Wildlife Institute of India, having more than close to three decades of experience in biodiversity research. And he's he's brief bio is there in the website. I hope everybody can have a look at it. And without waste much time, I thank him for joining us. Please, the floor is yours, sir. Thank you, Dr. Nehru Prabhakaran. Namaskar, everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening. As Dr. Nehru mentioned, we are attending this webinar from all over from the country. It is really immense pleasure, in fact, to welcome you all on behalf of the Wildlife Institute of India and Central Far International Forest Research Institute. So these are the two organizations came forward to together to organize this wonderful webinar. Mangrove, all of you aware, it is one of the wonderful ecosystem habitat. And it gives a lot of benefits to the humankind, as well as to the entire ecosystems, which around that mangrove system, all of you aware of that. But I don't want to talk more about that, but I will give you a small experience which I had personally observed these issues. And I was always thinking about how to address this issue in the future. That is, you may be aware, India had about around 6,500 square kilometers of mangroves. And majority of them are in the east coast of India, as well as Nandamon. And we do have a good mangroves in the west coast, but in the northern part of the west coast, Maharashtra and Gujarat, we have that good. And then coming down to the southern part of the west coast, we don't have much mangrove. Similarly, in the east coast also, when you move towards equator, the mangroves are slightly risk, probably might have destroyed by the community in the past. Nevertheless, I had a one experience working with the the second largest mangrove system of our country, that's called Koringa. The Koringa mangroves actually the habitat created by the the second largest river, India, that is called a Godavari River. So in the river mouth, the Godavari River meets the Bay of Bengal, that is the northern Indian version. It meets there where it is huge mangroves about 800 square kilometer area of the mangroves was created. When I spend about five, six years to understand the value of this mangrove, how it actually significant to this community who are living that area. And then what could happen because of this ongoing climate impact on the system and all those things. And very interesting information I got, although this mangrove is one of the very, very critical ecosystem for India to accommodate the one of the critically endangered fishing cat, that is a because we give a lot of importance to tiger in India, but we don't give much importance to the smaller cats. The one of the smaller cat and that with the endangered cat is the fishing cat. Not only the fishing cat, we had a good population hotter. So many other biodiversity are still thriving in this particular mangrove habitat. That is the value to the biodiversity. But when I went in depth, then I realized there was a strong link, almost about 100,000 families are directly or indirectly depend on this particular mangrove and the adjoining estuarine systems. Now the issue here is when I was looking for the impact of climate change on this particular system, because any adverse impact on the ecosystem will affect biodiversity as well as the socioeconomic condition of this community who are living there. We know this mangrove protect the people from cyclone storm because that area prone to storm area. That is a different concept. But coming to the lovely good issues, I was really worried. But I thought a very shocking information that not only the climate change affecting the mangrove ecosystem all over the country, all over the world, but we are also the development program that ongoing development program or real planned development programs of the country also affecting our mangrove system because all mangroves are normally created in the mouth of the rivers. And the river brings the nutrient and water from the landscape to the sea, the coastal area, that actually become the nutrient for the mangroves to thrive. Unfortunately, not even a single rivers in India that a major rivers in India untouched or undamned. Almost all the rivers are damp for various hydro project mean for diversion of water or generating electricity, whatever any kind of hydro projects on the river may give up with the release of water. We call them as a minimum environmental flow to sustain the life under the steam. But we can't do anything on the sediment inflow. The sediments of the nutrient that is supplied by the landscape to the mangrove ecosystem and other coastal habitat. Unfortunately, this is happening in the country. So all our estuarine habitat are highly threatened because hydro projects on the river. We are not taking note to the hydro project. We should have a hydro project. But again, it should be in a sustainable manner without harming the estuarine habitat and mangrove habitat. The reason is what will happen to these 100,000 families? If these dam waters are not flowing into the estuarine, then estuarine will become a marine. Then the people who are largely dependent on the estuarine biodiversity will lose those livelihoods actually. So your estuarine biodiversity will be changed or shifted into the marine biodiversity that may not be good for overall biodiversity conservation. So that is the big threats we are facing. When coming back to the climate change, I could observe this coastal squeeze program. In fact, the mangroves in the fringe of the towards the seaward side are actually destroyed by the sea level rise. And because of that, the composition of the mangrove community in that area getting changed. Most salt tolerant mangroves are really sustaining in a bigger way than the less tolerant salt tolerant tree species. That also worrying us because when the coastal squeeze happened, whether the mangroves can migrate towards the land, but there is no land for them to migrate. That is another issue we are facing. So what will happen to this biodiversity which are exclusively dependent on the mangrove ecosystem and the estuarine ecosystem? What will happen to those biodiversity? It's a big, big question. And then one more interesting information we come to know that the people will be losing the livelihood and the groundwater will be changing into salt water. These are the problems we actually come to know even the phenology because of the climate impact change. The phenolias of mangroves are changing it. And then there are a lot of biodiversity, especially the insect biodiversity and a lot of arboreal animals who are dependent on the phenological phenomenon of the mangrove, their biology actually getting changed. So because of that changes, again, the overall biodiversity is getting affected because of this climate change impact. So what we needed when you are trying to do something for or prepare something for adopting measure for conserve the climate mangroves with respect to climate change, we shouldn't prove it out with the impact of the development on the mangrove ecosystem. So that is also simultaneously needs to be addressed. And I hope this particular webinar, I could see that yesterday discussion and today and tomorrow. These are the tasks. Actually, there are well known experts are coming and we are very thankful to those excellent resource persons who kindly agree to provide input in this particular episode. I could see that the reasons are one of our stalwart in the country, who actually promoted a mangrove study in the country in a big way and he's with us is still guiding us. That is a great list of kindness to you, sir. So I without talking more and with this particular small discussion, I welcome all our resource person and also all the participants who joined from different parts of the world. And we wish you a wonderful seminar on Vigafar Wildlife Institute of India and the Centre for International Forest Research. Thank you very much. Namaskar. Thanks a lot, Professor Syokumar for providing a very good background for the setting the stage for this exciting day in the mangrove conference. Thank you. Thanks a lot, sir. So before proceeding to the next session, I would like to make one housekeeping announcement. So after the sessions, if you if any discussions or questions, kindly, you can post them in the Q&A box instead of chat box, because chat box is for different reasons. And please use the question and answer box for discussions. So our next session is the keynote address, the second keynote address of this exciting webinar. So I like to invite Sri Vasudevan sir for for providing us his insight on on the particular topic. A brief introduction about Sri Vasudevan sir is he's a 1987 batch IFS Indian Forest Service officer belongs to the Maharashtra cadre. And sir has a great background in marine biology. He had a master's in marine biology from Cochin University. And he is well known for he had a he so far had an illustrious career in the forest department. And he is a pillar of mangrove cell and which is one of one of the great success story in mangrove conservation in the country, which can in fact, provide a good case study for other countries to follow how this provides a very good, you know, example study for how policy can influence conservation of mangroves. And sir has been the pillar for this mangrove cell. He had headed the mangrove cell for eight years since its inception. And then foundation of mangrove foundation. So it was one of the greatest achievements under his leadership. And for his credit, he also a recipient recipient of Arun Bogirwar Award for Public Service Excellence in 2019 Maharashtra Civil Service Day Honour in 2017, a mangrove society of India Fellowship in 2016 and Sanctuary Asia Wildlife Service Award in 2015 and MS Swaminathan Foundation Special Award in 1992. He has published two books and contributed several articles on mangroves and other coastal ecosystems. Thanks a lot, sir, for being with us. It's a pleasure to have you with us. The floor is yours, sir. Thank you for joining. Thank you, Nehru. And good morning, which also means good afternoon. Good evening to all of you. And it's a great pleasure to be in the company of mangrove lovers from all over the world. I hope I'm audible. Yeah, thank you. So I'm here to talk about the, you call it success story, I call it by experience with the mangrove conservation in Maharashtra as stated by Nehru. It was for a long period for a usually for a, you know, bureaucrat civil servant, the tenure is normally two to three years. But somehow, Maharashtra decided that we should have continuity and kept me there for eight years for which, for which reason, I know I could do a few things which now people are calling calling it a success story. I'm really grateful for that. And I'm thankful to all the organizers of this event for inviting me. And let's start talking about what we did in Maharashtra. Let me share the small presentation. Is it visible now? Is my screen visible? Sir, your presentation, I think it's still loading. We could not see your presentation yet. Okay. Is it visible now? Yes. Now it is. Yeah, okay. So let's start. Let's introduce to you know, I am currently with the Forest Development Corporation. But from 2012 to 2019. And I was there with the mangrove sale. And just a brief introduction about the mangroves in mangrove cover in India. We have about 5000 hectares of mangroves in India. My major chunk of it, 42.45% is in the West Bengal, part of Sundarbans. We have about 320 square kilometers, which is just 6% of the total mangrove cover. But when we started the work, it was only 4% and we were sixth. Now we are fifth in the ranking. And there are 20 species of mangroves in Maharashtra. On the western coast, I think Maharashtra has the greatest diversity in terms of number of species. So this is a story we are talking about. From 2005 to 2013, the mangrove cover of Maharashtra had remained somewhat constant at 186 square kilometers. This is as per the report of Forest Service India. And they published reports every two years, starting from 1987 here, records of forest cover, including mangrove cover. And as I said, up to 2013, it was 186 square kilometers. And somewhere around 2012, we created the mangrove cell in Maharashtra as a dedicated unit for conservation of mangroves. And then the increase started. So by 2015, we had raised to 222 in 2017, 304. And by 2019, 320 square kilometers, which is basically a 70% increase in the mangrove cover. These are all in square kilometers. Now the 21 report is expected any time. And let's hope that it will show further progress in mangrove cover. This is roughly the graph from 1987 to 2019. This is how we have progressed. So when I talk about the mangrove story of Maharashtra, I think the first thing I should be talking about is an interim order of the Bombay High Court on mangrove conservation. We have a public interest litigation that is no anybody can file a public interest litigation on a public course and the court can take cognizance of that and ask government what they're doing. So in this case also, there was an organization called Conservation Action Trust, which filed public interest litigation. And on that basis, the Bombay High Court gave a very landmark order. So in that they said they should be a total freeze on the destruction and cutting of mangroves in the state. The background is that there was a lot of concern that in a city like Mumbai, the mangrove cover is getting lost. And there are a lot of pressures from several powerful lobbies to reclaim the land which is occupied by mangroves. And as such, there is a lot of population pressure on the natural resource in the city. And then it was compounded by the floods of 2005, in which a lot of Mumbai sank and a lot of people lost their lives. And there was also the background of the tsunami which happened in 2004. And so with all this background, the honorable High Court of Bombay took the stand that we should conserve the mangroves. And they prohibited all kinds of development on mangrove areas also within 50 meters, buffer from the mangrove areas. And they also ordered that no development permission is to be issued by any authority in respect of any area under mangroves, whether it is on government land or private land. And then one very important part of that judgment was that mangrove land should be converted as protected forests, which is a category of forests, and handed over to the forest department. Till this point, Forest Department did not have any role in managing mangroves. And we foresters are trained to manage terrestrial forests. So in that sense, we practically had no connection with the mangroves. But following this judgment, there was a mapping of the entire Mumbai in the area based on satellite imagery. And then around 5469 hectares of mangrove were transferred to Forest Department. And for the first time, we became managers of mangroves, at least in Mumbai. And the orders also stated that in the rest of the Maharashtra Coast, that is the western state in India, the entire Maharashtra Coast is about 720 kilometers. So in that course, we have mangroves spread out. And these mangroves are to be handed over to the Forest Department. So Forest Department did a lot of mapping. And you can see the map of Mumbai with that creek going in between which is the Asia's largest creek called Dhani Creek. So the map on the left is the map which shows a different mangrove area. The red one is the degraded mangrove areas, sparse mangroves. And the green one is the dense mangrove areas. And rest are mudflats and habitations and creeks, etc. Blue is the creek. So this is how the mapping was done. And subsequently, we did it for the entire Maharashtra Coast. So I'll talk about some of these legal institutional policy initiatives which we took in Maharashtra, which can also be a model for some of the other constant states in India, and perhaps even for other countries. So most important development. As I said, in 2005, this order came from High Court of Bombay. And by around 2008, the government had declared these areas as protected forests and handed over to the Forest Department. But then still there was a vacuum because we were not trained to manage forests. So it continued to be somewhat neglected in the overall scheme of Forest Department. So it was decided that there should be a dedicated cell for conservation frameworks. That is how the mangrove cell of Maharashtra came into existence. And till today, Maharashtra is the only state with such a dedicated cell for mangrove conservation. It also looks looks after coastal and marine biodiversity issues. So one very important decision was to declare the mangroves as protected forests. Then government of Maharashtra decided that protected forests are riddled with certain rights and incumbrances. And there is a higher level higher degree of protection required for mangroves. So they decided to declare them as reserve forests. These are things you can just understand that reserve forests are a higher degree of protection than protected forests. I will not get into the details of their distinction. Maybe if somebody is interested, we can talk about in the question and session. So in Mumbai, I had already said that about 5400 hectares, which includes Mumbai and Navya Mumbai. But this Mumbai alone, Navya Mumbai is on the eastern side of that Tanakree. Mumbai proper is where you have two districts, Mumbai and Mumbai Suburban. So you have 4500 hectares of declared reserve forests. The number is growing now because there are agencies which are still holding on to some mangrove areas, and they are slowly releasing it to the Forest Department. And rest of Maharashtra cost we have declared about 12500 hectares. So in all 17,000 hectares of mangroves on government land is declared as reserve forests, which is about 90% of the mangroves on government land. Maybe 10% is remaining. That is an ongoing process. And then we strengthened the mangrove protection framework, particularly in Mumbai, where you have a huge influx of population coming from different parts of the country, looking for employment and livelihood. And then their first target is mangrove areas that they can settle down. Because housing is a huge problem in Mumbai. So we created a special task for Mumbai. It's called Mumbai mangrove conservation unit. And we established forest stations and different strategic points. And we had a shortage of manpower from the Forest Department. So we borrowed the service of Maharashtra Security Corporation, which is basically a very interesting concept of people who apply for a job as a police constable. They prepare a waiting list, those who are not selected, but they are given specialized training, almost similar to that of the police personnel. And they are also given weapons and even some legal powers. So this corporation, usually they look after industrial establishments and all that. But we thought they would be a good resource for protecting Mumbai's mangrove. So we initially I had more than 150 personnel. The number has gone up of late, maybe it is crossing 200 now. So and there was illegal encroachments all over in mangrove areas. So we have removed 6000 illegal hutments from various parts of Mumbai, using a lot of force sometimes, taking the help of police and overcoming a lot of resistance from very powerful lobbies, including politicians. But also in fairness, I think I should state this that the government of Maharashtra gave very huge very strong support to us in removing these encroachments. They stood solidly behind us, particularly our minister and our secretary stood strongly behind us. So that's why you could overcome all kinds of political and other pressures. And then we created mangrove nursery. There are all about 12 mangrove nurseries all over Maharashtra. And we created nursery, particularly a few species which are found rare. They were particularly picked up from selected locations and raised in the nurseries so that their density would be more in the natural environment. And we did a lot of plantations, 8.3 million saplings were planted between 2013 to 2021, which covers 1890 hectares and spread over 120 locations. There's a massive mangrove plantation movement in which government front was used. And then there was CSR funding support from companies like Volkswagen, ICIC bag and all that. They also gave support. And then there were also, you know, you're also given support as part of the government program for increasing the forestry cover in Maharashtra. So this is a very successful effort. And then we found that mangrove cell is like a regulatory body. It's part of the forest department. And it can regulate activities in the mangrove. It was given statutory powers to do that. But we needed a development body also. And there was an issue of no getting funds for this fund for mangrove development on a sustainable and continuous basis. So we created the mangrove foundation, which is called the mangrove and marine biodiversity conservation foundation, which addresses mangrove and marine biodiversity conservation both. It's a registered society. It started in December 2015. Fortunately, at that time, the new Mumbai airport was getting come in. The work was about to start and clearances were pending. And the government of India ordered that 115 crores, that is 1150 million, almost 1 billion rupees, should be given for mangrove conservation. So that's how we started. And then we built on the corpus fund from various projects, which have indirect or direct impact on mangroves. And that is how the mangrove foundation has got a corpus fund of the vote, 5 billion rupees in dollar terms. So this is now available. And from the interest of that corpus, a lot of activities are being carried out by the mangrove cell and the mangrove foundation all over by Russia. I'll talk about what activities we are doing. And the advantage of this arrangement is that you need not depend entirely on the government funding. You can mobilize resources from outside. So the CSR fund can also come in from projects which have impact, they can come in. And in any private contribution can also come in. So this is the model that we have developed. And it talks, it looks after this foundation looks after Marine World of City Conservation, sustainable livelihood activities, they promote research, education and awareness. We have small grants program for young researchers. There's a lot of things. And we also support mangrove conservation. We have to pay the Maharashtra Security Corporation for the the personnel we hire. So that is also paid from the mangrove foundation. We created a mangrove, we created walls around mangrove areas in very sensitive areas where slums are threatening to get into the the mangrove areas. So all that was done. And then it has got a structure of its own with a lot of people hired plus technical personnel hired from different sources. And at the grassroot level, also, we made some institutional arrangements like mangrove co-management committees at the panchayat level, and self-help groups of beneficiaries. We hired project associates with fisheries background and forestry background to to communicate the idea of mangrove conservation with the local communities, and also to train them in livelihood activities. So all this, you know, are supported by livelihood specialists at district level, and then there's a core team at the mangrove foundation to guide overall activities. And we had to do a lot of capacity building because Forest Department was ill equipped to handle mangrove management and associated activities. So we trained our own staff, we got lateral entry of specialists, and we published a lot of field guides. And in communication, we know one outreach, we created this flagship sanctuary called Thanakrit Flaming Science Sanctuary. A lot of tourists come and visit the mangrove areas, and they go by boat and watch the flooding flows. We created a coastal marine biodiversity center, a high tech, you know, state of the art center with the help of our German partners in the GIZ project. Then in the urban areas, you know, the mangrove areas are littered with a lot of debris. We involved the local communities, you know, the, the urban communities, the residential associations, or the student bodies, youth bodies, and they're voluntarily cleaned. And we have cleaned 8,000 tons of solid waste from mangrove segment by. And that is one place in the mentioned in the Limka Book of Request. And we introduced a number of livelihood activities like crab farming, muscle farming, then in Maharashtra, there's a lot of oyster picking going on by women. It's a backbreaking activity. So we started this oyster farming with the help of all these technical institutions and cage culture of fishes, floating cages. It was in a species like sea bass. Ornamental fishing, we started a central breeding facility for clownfish, from which all these little clownfishes are given to village level cell fill groups, and they would rare them for two months and then they would be, they would be getting a better price. And then village community, village eco-tour, women's groups will take tourists by boat to mangrove areas, explain about the different species, and also give them a good, nice lunch and talk about their traditions, cultures and rituals. So that's a wholesome experience that they gave to the tourists. And in all this process, we were supported by a number of institutions. There are central institutes, basically ICR institutes and marine fisheries and brackish water and fisheries technology. And then there is the Marine Products Export Development Authority and so many other Salli Melli Central Farm Mythology, Wildlife Institute, BNHS, so many NGOs also joined us. But this model, which I was talking about, which is basically about creation of a big corpus fund. This is the breakup of the different sources from where we accumulated this corpus of 526 crores. But we also got funds from state budget, about 15 crores were given for livelihood activities. Apart from the interest on this corpus, we had funds from state budget for organ activities like livelihood activities, then some of these CSR from districts from southern bodies. So we had to externally edit projects also UNDP project and GIC project and then now the green climate fund is also supporting us. So this is the growth in the corpus front of mangrove foundation, starting from 115 crores, it has reached 526 crores in just about 26 years. So now the way forward will be to know through the green climate fund project, which is spread over three states, including Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha. We are trying to scale up some of these activities, including Marine Bayada city conservation, with a focus on climate change. And we want to expand the livelihood activities to a level where it will benefit about 10,000 families across Maharashtra, Maharashtra coast. And then we are planning a multi species hatchery for crabs, sea bass and bivalves. Many institutes will come together, give their technology and will work under one roof. And that will be given big boost to the the co-culture based livelihood activities for people living close to the mangrove areas. And then for the urban population to appreciate the the aesthetic value and the to have a sense of oneness with nature. We are creating two major parks in Mumbai. There's already a center of a tidally, which I have spoken about, but then two major centers for recreation. They are coming up in Mumbai. The Gorewada park is already under construction. And the the hazard will also soon start. With these two parks, we really showcase the mangrove areas. The idea is that generally people of Mumbai look at mangroves as some kind of wasteland, where, you know, mosquitoes breed, antiviral elements proliferate. There's nothing much normal citizen can get from the mangrove areas. And he's really not bothered about the livelihood activity because he has other livelihoods, he or she. So this is to showcase the value of mangroves. They can take their children, their families to the mangrove areas, understand nature, a bit of education, bit of entertainment. That is how we look at the conservation. But now with this model, the entire mangrove conservation, the mangrove foundation with its robust financial support that it can give for a sustainable for the long period of time. Now it is in safe hands. And this model, the government of India has also actually indicated that in the wireless national wildlife action plan, they've indicated that all coastal states should follow this model by creating coastal ecosystem cell and by giving dedicated attention to the mangroves in marine biodiversity. And they can also get funding like this like we got in mangrove foundation, wherever projects have impact on coastal or marine biodiversity, that fund can be dedicated a certain percentage of that project cost can be dedicated for this mangrove conservation. And that will really sustain the mangrove conservation in marine biodiversity conservation efforts, without really depending on the vagaries of government support, which may vary from year to year. So this in brief is our Maharashtra model. And if there are any questions, I'd be glad to answer. Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you, sir, for sharing with us. You have a wonderful model for how public, private and government institutions come together can achieve in mangrove conservation. It was great to hear the story, great to hear the actions taken by the Maharashtra Forest Department towards conservation of mangroves. And this has in fact paved way for, you know, replicas, it's in a way a replicable model. And it is, I hope other other states could also take it up and replicate it. And as I see from the question and answers box, there is, there are not much questions. There is one question. What is the survival rate of restoration from nurseries to replantations? Sir, is there any insights on that? Yeah, survival is really good. We have to make sure that the the plantation sites are selected properly. And we have to ensure that there is regular flushing of tidal water. And our nurseries, now we grow them well, and the planting stock is maintained well. So the success rate is very high. I would say it's not less than 80%. And we have not had any experience of major failures. Maybe one or two sites, there was a problem with tidal flushing, even after we created canals, then you have to do desilting from time to time to ensure that tidal flow. Sometimes there is no selection of species, although you do proper planning at the ground level, sometimes there's a little bit of bungling. And it may lead to some mortality. But generally, I think the mangroves are really very resilient. And if you give a bit of helping hand, they will definitely bounce back. Because of the crunch of time, I would only take one more question. So there is a question. The livelihood program are great. How are the market linkages are established for the corporatives? Yeah, they are not cooperative. They are basically self-eligible groups. And these self-eligible groups are connected to the village-level mangrove conservation units, or so they are linked to the panther. But generally, we help them in getting the market. For example, we take Seabass culture. There's a huge demand for Seabass. And whatever it produces, start up by the market. There is no problem at all. And they get good price. Only we have a problem with oysters, because they don't fetch too much price. And then unless you do that, I mean, they are really export quality, but then you have to do that process of removing the pollutants and chemical elements in that. That kind of facility is not established. But as far as crabs and seabass are concerned, there is no problem. And ornamental fishery, now it is picking up very well. And a lot of people are coming to buy these ornamental fishes from us. The tourism is flourishing. We have also introduced some kayaking in some areas. So that's also getting good publicity. Mangrove Foundation actually gets involved with marketing of the produce moving way. And they connect to the local communities with the buyers. But there is a lot more that one can do in the course of time to enhance the marketing potential of this. As the volume increases, as the more and more villages come into play, I think larger players will also come and join us in giving a good marketing support to these valued products. Thank you. Thanks a lot, sir. So there are a few more questions in the question and answer session. And if time permits, I kindly request you to answer them in the question and session. So thanks a lot. I'll be glad. Thank you. So thank you for joining us. So with that, we move on to the next session. Before I introduce the speaker of the next session, maybe this is one of the Blue Moon events. So that means it's it will be great to have a picture clicked with all the panelists around. So I request Vito to take a moment to click a group picture. So I kindly request all the resource persons to turn on your cameras and just flash a mangrove smile for a moment. So Vito, you're ready? Yes. So open your everybody. Open the cameras. Time to stretch your face a little bit and say mangrove cheese. Is there any products such as cheese mangrove? No, I don't think so. Yeah. Okay. So everybody on the cam. Yes, Dr. Rama, Rama Subramian, are you there? Probably you can open your camera. If not, let's take the first. Okay, smile, give the widest smile you have. One, two. Okay, one more time. Keep the smile on. One, two, three. Okay, that's right. Thank you. Back to you, Dr. Nehru. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. So with that, we move on to the next session. We have with us. Dr. Professor Baduri. Professor Baduri, could you hear us? You're there? I can. I can hear you. Thank you so much. So thanks a lot for joining us. So, so before handing the floor over to Dr. Professor Baduri, I'd like to give a brief introduction about him. So he had completed his master's from Edinburgh and PhD from Polymouth in the United Kingdom. And he is one of the key researchers among mangrove researchers in India. He works mostly largely on microorganisms. And he has very interesting publications on his career. And so many of them are very, very recent publications, especially on biogeography aspects. And he's a he had contributed to many editorial boards. And he he was the team leader of India's Arctic Expeditions 2010. And also was one of the key panelists on climate resilience and coastal adaptation in the recently concluded COP26 at Glasgow. And he's a detailed brief bio is there in the website. I encourage everyone to have a look at it. So because the kinds of time I stop here and handing the floor over to Dr. Baduri. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Prabhakaran. Just give me a second. I hope you can see my full screen. Yes. Yes. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Prabhakaran. Thank you, Dr. Pumia. I think you've given me a very, very tight and a complex topic to cover. And just like most of the speakers are facing. So I need to I'll talk about the importance of benthic fauna in in mangrove ecosystems. But rather than giving a broad overview, I'll focus on one or two groups and two examples trying to help you understand that we really do not know much about how benthic fauna actually regulates most of the ecosystem processes rather than some generalization that we have and that reflects the lack of knowledge and the need to undertake such kind of experiments in in mangrove ecosystems, particularly in the Indian subcontinent. To us, we already know that coastal oceans are very, very important to our human, our health, livelihood, well-being, everything is linked to the coastal oceans. 5,000 years of the history of the civilization that we have, you know, that is intricately shaped by the coastal ocean. So, so the importance of coastal ocean need not be, you know, reemphasized, but we need to understand how important this is. And the land ocean boundary systems, many of the biotopes that are there, which we call it as marginal marine environments, among which mangroves are there, they are very critical to maintaining our health system. Now, when we talk about ecosystem processes, there are many of these processes that goes on. Here is one representation from the wardens paper of science that came out a couple of years ago. Essentially, it's a microbial look. But here I wanted to highlight the importance to understand the benthic pelagic captain, how the benthic fluxes are controlling the tropic level systems. And between in the benthic, when you're trying to understand the benthic flux, how the communities are interacting with each other. And frankly speaking, in mangrove systems, we do not know much about it. Some work has been done, but our knowledge is largely limited. And therefore, we need to understand these processes in a much deeper way. I will give two examples in this talk today. First, I'll talk about this group, the benthic foraminifera, we do not call them as benthic fauna because they're protist. But they're very, very important and relatively little studied in mangroves. And the second one is, is a typical Metazone group, the free living marine nematodes. And I'll, I'll try to highlight how we, how by knowing these communities, we can start to decode the, understand the microbial loop, the interaction between the benthic and the pelagic layers. Now, this brings in the concept of bio complexity because coastal ocean is very, very complex and the biological communities that are there in this kind of systems are extremely complex. The reason being is that there is an intricate functional relationship between this complexity that has been shaped over thousands of years. And that ultimately has been translated into ecosystem processes. What we know that many of the biological complexity that we see, including in case of benthic organisms, these are some way or other related to the physical and chemical complexity of coastal ocean. And when you're talking about the Indian subcontinent, this is far more interesting because most of the mangroves that we have, for example, in the east coast of India, they are strongly influenced by the freshwater. And therefore, we have very typical functional guilds that are there and how these are being driven needs to be understood. And when you want to understand such kind of processes, organismal function or organismal structure interaction, we need to have regular and long-term observation, essentially snapshots of observations. And this is what is the basis of time series. Time series provides a very deeper understanding of really what the organism is doing in the ecosystem, how organisms are interacting between each other, and ultimately how the ecosystem responses are on a large scale, which is ultimately linked to the socioeconomics, as we have been hearing in the last lecture. Now, when we talk about coastal ocean, and we need to focus on the marginal marine environments, essentially, these are very young structures. These have been formed since the end of last post-placial rise of sea levels, so around 12,000 years or so. And mangroves is one of the features of that. One of the other things that we see is that many of these young structures, they not only are a major sink of TOC, as we heard about in yesterday's lecture of Gourmet, but also they are facing rapid changes because of anthropogenic climate change and the changes that is brought in in terms of the relative sea levels. So you have got the effect of the Anthropocene, that also needs to be understood in terms of the functional guilds of benthic communities. I work in the Sundarbans, our team works in Sundarbans, and here is the Indian part of the Sundarbans, and I'm showing to you is the world's largest contiguous mangrove ecosystems spread across India and Bangladesh. But what is very interesting about Sundarbans is that if you look at the freshwater flow of Sundarbans, it can vary between 40,000 cubic meter per second to about 120,000 cubic meter per second, you know, that happens during the monsoon day. And it has got very high suspended particulate metal load between 200 to 700 milligram per liter. So obviously, there are extremes out there, you know, you got huge freshwater flow in which the mangroves have evolved. You have got organisms which are living in the benthic layers that withstand this fluctuation of freshwater and mixing of the saline water. And then you have got the surface water where there is hardly light is penetrating through, through, therefore, the phytorectritis that is settling down that also, you know, kind of varies seasonally. And that brings in a lot of stressors to the benthic community. So, so we need to then understand some of this component in a deeper way. And of course, in this water, there are millions and millions of bacteria cells. So what we have done is more than almost 12 years now, we set up our time series site. This we have named it as Sundarbans biological observatory time series. This is probably the only time series site based in mangroves in South Asia, if I'm not wrong. And what we have done is we have set up this time series site in the western most part of the Indian Sundarbans is this big island is there called Sagar Island. And we have got three stations that we monitor, you know, look at all the things benthic organisms, you know, biological and chemical fluxes, reds, processes, everything that we can think of, so that we can disentangle many of the unknown processes, for example, regional carbon fluxes, regional nitrogen cycle, you know, what is the carrying capacity of this ecosystem in terms of fisheries? Those are the kind of questions that we are interested about. And typically a time series site gives you this kind of robust data here, what I've done is I plotted our time series data of salinity, for example, in the western most part of Sundarbans. And you can see that there's oscillation is there. But what is very interesting is that the saline condition is actually changing, it is becoming more saline. So there is less freshwater flow is happening. So that would also bring in a lot of changes in terms of structure and function of biological communities, including benthic communities. One interesting aspect to look at it is when you when you look at benthic communities, we cannot remove the microbial communities in terms of bacterial communities, because they are very, very important. They are the ones which are making the organic matter available in some form or other to the benthic communities, particularly the labile purposes. So here what we have done is we have tried to figure out why the Sundarbans mangrove is very, very unique. And here we have done deep sequencing and next generation sequencing. And we see that in Sundarbans, there are unique populations of farmic duties are there and it's a bibliodominated system, which is very different from the rest of the other ecosystems or many of the other mangroves, for example, in China to begin, say, say the Geo long history or the Paul history, the Hengzu history mangroves. And of course, the other coastal system. So, so, so therefore, the interaction between the microbes and the benthic layers are very, very important. And therefore, this is interesting. The second thing I wanted to highlight is that in this system, such as in Sundarbans, we have got a lot of nitrogen in the system. Okay. Most of this nitrogen is coming in the westernmost part because of the anthropogenic nitrogen input. So, so we can now differentiate parts of the Sundarbans into low nitrogen areas and high nitrogen areas. And obviously, the forms of nitrogen, for example, ammonia versus nitrate, that would have huge implications in terms of hydrothermal pool and resulting influences in terms of benthic communities and ultimately ecosystem processes. So, I'll give you the first example. These are foramide ferrari, you know, these are very, very primitive organisms, you know, they've evolved during the pre-Cambian times and have continued to diversify, you know, planet. Mostly, there are two forms that they are based on the chemical structures. You have got the agglutinated form and the calcareous form. So, this is something which is very, very important because they are made up of the carbonate system. And when you're talking about a changing ocean, changing carbonate chemistry, ocean acidification scenario, these is a group something that you should look at. So, here what I have, I'm trying to show you, for example, in Sundarbans, when you look at what is the community pattern is, well, one thing is very clear is, you don't have high species diversity of benthic foramide ferrari. Okay? Number one. Number two, you see that the system is dominated by stress tolerance taxa. So, ammonia is a fantastic example of that. It doesn't matter. Whenever you sample, you know, you see that there is dominance of ammonia in the system. But also, you get a lot of signals which are very, very unique for a mangrove system. So, for example, jadamina macrocells. So, this is a foramine ferrari we find in mangrove, in only mangroves. So, what there is mangrove vegetation is there. So, imagine a scenario where the vegetation is degrading or breaking up. Then you will be able to use jadamina as an ecological tool or to understand the health of the breakdown or the kind of degradation of the mangroves. And there are oscillations of other groups that happens in this system. So, there is a seasonal pattern that we see in the in the benthic foramine ferrari. And when you look at it from a viewpoint of calcareous and adlutinated form, the system is dominated by calcareous form. So, the reason being is that the calcareous form, the test or the shell that we call it as, they are very, very robust. So, in Sundarban system, you know, you've got a lot of wave action is there. Okay? So, thus, the calcareous forms have a much bigger chance of kind of, you know, surviving. Adlutinated form, we find more upstream of the Sundarban. So, if you go more north, but the freshwater flow is more important. So, there is a new friend stoichiometry that is playing a very, very important role, which is determining or controlling the distribution of the adlutinated forces that calcareous foramine ferra. But when you try to understand the ecosystem from the viewpoint of foramine ferra, I think one is very important to understand is live-to-death ratio. You know, live foramine ferra test, here you can see on the bottom right-hand side, the more than 70% of the test is has actually taken up a stain called the rosebengal stain. So, this is an indicator of ecological health, the live test. And here what you have done is you have tried to plot the live-and-death test based on the salinity gradient. So, from top to bottom, as you go down, the salinity becomes, you know, increased in Sundarban. These are the two major estuaries, for example, the mothland, the takula. And here you see that actually live test are not much is there. Wherever there is live test is there, the mangrove vegetation is very, very diverse. So, actually you can start to disentangle or use the live-to-death ratio of foramine ferra as a way to understand the health of the Sundarban system. And you can do it in any mangrove as a matter of fact. It's not like just Sundarban, but it's very important in this system because here the freshwater flow is a very important factor. Now, what here I have done is I've tried to give you some understanding of how the patterns actually changes. If I take the Sundarban mangrove, if I take the mangroves of the Gautami Godavari estuary and let me take a legonal system such as Sri Lanka, you know, and we did the studies a couple of years back. We looked at 11,378 specimens and these encompassed about 32 species and 13 families. And you look at the species richness, Shannon diversity and Fisher's Alpha, you'll see that actually the mangroves of the Gautami Godavari estuary, they are much rich in terms of species, okay, foramine ferra species. But if you look at the Chilika or if you look at the Sundarban, the species richness is not that much. But if you look it in terms of Shannon diversity and Fisher's Alpha, of course, the Gautami Godavari estuary shows a very different pattern. So that tells you that even along a geographical gradient starting from Sundarban to the estuaries of the Gautami Godavari, the mangroves, there is a trend that appears in the system and that may be because of the fluxes that is changing in the ecosystem. Now, if we take this data and try to plot it with other global studies. So for example, other mangroves that we know globally in terms of the species diversity and of course in legumes, we see that our Sundarban is actually summer intermediate, okay, or the Gautami Godavari is more on the higher side. So it tells you that the wreckish water and the normal marine scenario, how that actually plays a very, very important role in controlling the structure and function of the of the Bentic for Aminipera communities. Now, during the course of study, we found very interesting things. We found cryptic biodiversity examples. Here we found three new putative species of for Aminipera. We have named it as ammonia T2, T6 and T10 and they are very different from what we have seen in published literature or from the taxonomic keys. They have a distribution that ranges from Sundarbans to Chilica Lagoon. So mostly in the northeast coastal way of Bengal. So the question is their number is also quite high. So obviously these species have actually adapted to this ecosystem and they are playing a very important role in terms of turnover of carbon or nitrogen or other important elements and they may be playing a very important role in the overall ecosystem processes. So we can start to now decode the individual importance of these cryptic species in ecosystems such as Sundarbans or in Chilica to begin with. Now, from here, I go to the second example. Here the idea is I'll talk about the free living marine nematodes because they are numerically very, very abundant. Wherever you go, the dish our species estimation is very poor. I think there are about 10,000 species that we know but actually the number of species could be several poles higher. So the idea here in this case is we look at the marine nematodes in the benthic sediment from the not only just from microscopy but from the viewpoint of molecule level so that ultimately we can link it with functions and flux measurements. So organisms, community structure, flux measurements and this is a very challenging group to work with because from the Indian mangrove system or in the Indian subcontinent, there's only a few hundred species have been discovered and there's so much cryptic biodiversity is there. And the available keys that are there, these are mostly from the European or North American waters. So it doesn't really help us. In Sundarbans, we have recorded 179 species of the pre-living marine nematodes and we can differentiate them based on the functional fields, for example, whether they're bacteria wars, whether they're tetrahedral peders, et cetera. But I think our understanding is still very poor because we see huge cryptic biodiversity of this group. Now, what I'll do is I'll give you an example from the west coast of India. So these are the two mangroves that we are studying, Caroline Agarwati, actually part of the Sindhudur system. Here what we have done is instead of doing the traditional or the morphology-based identification, you have taken the help of molecular tools. So we have collected sediment cores and from the sediment core, we have top three centimeter of the sediment core, we have extracted the environmental DNA and we made library and we have done sequencing. And from there, we started to deduce the ecological function. So here you can see that there are different groups of freely maintained nematodes that they are. But what is very important is what kind of information can we draw? Well, the first information we draw is that there is dominance of groups in oxyclean. So as the upper layer is becoming more and more oxy, there is dominance of this group. In the oxycanoxic boundary, there are only specialized groups that they are. There are organisms that they are which actually plays a very important role in breakdown of organic matter. There is dominance of proteobacteria in the system. So that's something which is interacting with the pre-living marine nematode communities. It seems there are some nematode bacteria associations going on and there is evidence of sulfur reduction. And what is very interesting is we find this genus called sabatheera. It's a free-living marine nematogenera genus which is tolerant to low oxygen concentration. You know that the mangrove sediment actually faces prolonged suboxy conditions. So this organism can be present along the vertical core of the sediment or the vertical layer of the sediment. So they are very, very important. And if I go to the east coast of India, that is also the case. Now, when we looked at it more thoroughly, we found that there are several hundreds of these noble sequences. These are very, very widespread. It looks to us these are very these could be cryptic species complexes. As a matter of fact, we are working now three new species which are describing in different stages from the system. And one thing has become very clear is that the global databases of very nematodes are not adequate to actually assign the nematodes that we see in mangrove ecosystem, mangrove sediment. So if we want to deduce bigger picture of ecological structure, function or flux measurements, we really first have to get our baseline information much more robust. The other part I wanted to highlight very quickly is that we really do not know how tanning breakdown actually happens. Mangrove litter, millions and tons of it actually are being shaded every year. And we really do not understand what is the effect of the litter fall on the benthic sediment. And here in this case, we are doing some experiments, mesocosm experiments where we have bought hundreds of several hundreds of liters of water from the Sundarbans and put up a sedimentary layer, trying to understand the mimic the benthic pelagic coupling processes and we have put tanning and enriched them with tanning and then run this experiment for a long duration. And we of course see that a shift of the bacterial communities from proteobacteria dominant system to functional important systems such as bacteroidities and pharmacities. So remember we talked about pharmacities in the beginning and these communities will have a huge impact on the sedimentary layer, on the sedimentary benthic organisms. And here is one nice example where you can see our delta 13C measurements, stabilizer measurement clearly reflects how in terms of control to tanning which system actually the delta 13C signature is changing and the responses of phytoplankton zooplankton keeps changing. So obviously that would have a cascading effect on the sedimentary benthic community. So we are still doing these experiments trying to understand really what is going on at the benthic organismal level. So hopefully some other opportunity I'll be able to share the data with you all. Now I come to the much bigger picture application side. We have been talking about nature-based solutions yesterday and here I'm showing in Sundarbans that the top one photo is what has happened after Amphan. Actually the system started to regenerate of course ecosystem is very resilient mangrove ecosystem are resilient. But then again this year there's another cyclone yes was there inundation was there. So and in the Bay of Bengal we are going to see more and more of this you know becoming frequent a tower being the latest example. Now mangrove plantation has to be more scientific approach has to be taken and here what we are doing is we have proposed a concept called geobiometrics concept. The idea is to bring in stability to the mangrove sapling. We are using the benthic owner to actually augment nutrition bringing in metric stability so that in a small time the mangrove saplings can go much faster and that ultimately play very very important role in sedimentary stability. This is important for Sundarbans where there is very high erosion of sediment. It's a natural process that is going on and of course sea level rise has been accelerating that. So this is a typical local solution to an NBS approach. I almost come to the end. We use the benthic owner for sea level rise measurements. So we can look at our paper and last but not the least automation is very important. If you want to understand process such as benthic process you have to do automation. In Sundarbans we are doing that. 24 by 7 data is coming from the benthic pelagic layer so that we can ultimately build up this kind of model that we have done for Kakinara where we see that the macro benthous is a very very important component that is controlling the sedimentary processes. So why do we all of this? We are doing all of this to ultimately understand or contribute to the SDG goals particularly life below water and I think zero hunger is according to me is very important and of course 13. And why all of these are important because it is important because we the humans benefit more from marine resources if ocean management is successfully integrated and this is what we have written in the second world open assessment of the United Nations and we have a lot to know from this system. Thank you very much for your time and listening. Thank you. Thanks a lot Professor Badri for the exciting talk. In fact the previous speakers in the last day have emphasized on least studied organisms in mangroves and you have exactly you have focused on that it was very exciting to hear. And as I see from the Q&A box there is no questions as such but as if there are questions maybe you can just post the question in the Q&A box that Professor Badri will answer it later in the day. Is that fine Professor Badri? Yeah absolutely fine thank you. Okay so and we have one request Vasudevan sir want to go live for a answer so do you want to take over to answer it? Is it any mangrove species growing in freshwater? No generally the mangroves grow in brackish water. They prefer a 70 range between 15 to 20 beauty. Sometimes they can told it higher quality. There are some species which prefer low salinity. Of course now we found that no other species like territorial littles, dolicantones, and sonoracea cassiolarity prefer low salinity. Absolutely freshwater some species may grow because now their mechanism is designed to exclude salt. Not that they love salt. They have a mechanism to tolerate salt but at the same time in a purely freshwater environment they get edged out by the more aggressive, competent, more suitable species. The mangroves don't generally thrive in the freshwater areas. And then if you go to catch in that area far away from the sea you'll find an odd mangrove. But I have not really found mangroves other than this salt environment thriving far away from the coast. There are many mangrove associates which you can always find in and some classify them as mangroves. For example, the plant is basically some people may say it's a mangrove. Most people say it's a mangrove associate. They can be found in the they're equally comfortable in the mangrove environment. They are found elsewhere also. There are a few other species which are in the border, borderline. Even the only cantons that they see some people say it's a mangrove associate. So in general observations that we don't have to worry about whether mangroves are thriving in the freshwater environment. We should be happy that there are a group of plants which can thrive even in the southern environment and they are still there on the face of the earth. And we should try our best to protect them. And that is a niche where no other plants can occupy. That is a borderline. Sorry. Okay. Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. So there are questions coming up for Dr. Professor Bhadri also because of the time price I request you to take it in the Q&A session and answer it there itself. Thank you. So we will for now we can break for a few minutes and then we will back in five minutes time to have other sessions lined up. So we will be back around 10.55. Thank you. Okay. Welcome back everyone. Welcome back everyone for the next session. So like previous session so for this session we have a one more talk and then followed by a panel discussion. So the next talk will be delivered by Dina from University of Georgia because of the time difference Dina could not join us. So it's already a midnight in Georgia. So that means so we're going to have a video presentation made by Dina and a short introduction about Dina. She is a doctoral candidate at Department of Geography and Integrative Department of Geography and Integrative Conservation Program at the University of Georgia. She works largely on the mangrove and socio-ecological systems in Bittarkarnika and recently there are some interesting papers she had came up with. So kindly you can check the bio of her in the website. So I request Vito to play the video presentation right away. Thank you. Hi everyone. I'm Dina Raskina a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and the Integrative Conservation Program at the University of Georgia. So for my doctoral research I study the reciprocal relationships between human mangrove ecosystems in India specifically in Bittarkarnika our wildlife century. And today I will be presenting some of my research that looks at how small-scale pressures like fiber extraction can impact mangrove carbon services and how that relates to socio-cultural values of people living near these forests. So just to give you an overview this is a brief outline of what I intend to share with you today. I will begin by giving some background on the different mangrove management or protection regimes in the country and then dive into how that might or how that influences socio-social cultural values of people living near these areas. Also what that really means for the long-term sustainability of mangrove vegetation by presenting some results from my research. And as we all know mangroves provide a wealth of services that support and maintain human communities around the world. Now these include protection from storm surges and floods, nurseries and breeding habitats for a variety of terrestrial estuarine and marine fauna and livelihood needs of local communities. They are also equally important from a climate mitigation point of view because of their carbon sequestration services. Mangroves can sequester a large amount of carbon even more than their more than terrestrial rainforests and much of this carbon is stored in the form of in soil beneath the mangrove trees. So although carbon mitigation services seem very important in the current times and rightly so the irony is that people who live very close to these forests may or may not see them in terms of carbon. They associate these forests with a number of ecosystem services such as a place where fish is plenty, water is plenty, the water is clean, their houses are safe and they have wood which is also for some form of carbon but wood to build their houses boats to fish and also wood to cook their food. So where are these forests located in India and how does that influence mangrove human values? Let's look at how protection areas are for defined in India first before diving into where these forests are found in the country. So in India protected areas such as national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, etc. They're as shown on the map here in the form of these yellow polygons a special zone set aside for biodiversity conservation. And apart from providing a habitat for threatened and endangered species, it is also important to note that these areas are not entirely isolated but are embedded in highly human dominated landscapes. Therefore, frictional relationships between officials and local people because of illegal extraction or human wildlife conflict is often observed in such areas. So it's also important to note that rights and privileges of local people differ in each protected area. For example, in a national park human interference from timber harvesting, fuel wood collection, or collection of minor forest products as well as private ownership rights is prohibited. Whereas these restrictions are waived off in the sanctuaries as long as they do not interfere with the well-being of wildlife. We also see a very similar situation with most of the mangrove forests in the country. So India possesses about 3% of the world's mangrove forests which are shaped by different press and pulse disturbances such as sea level rise, coastal development arising from infrastructure projects like roads or tourism projects as well as frequent tropical cyclones that impact our course annually. So in the country these forests are distributed all along the west and the east coast and its islands. And much of the remaining large expanses of mangrove forests are found within in protected zones within the country. Some of them are listed here. So it kind of becomes imperative to understand how these multiple zones of protection kind of accommodate these multiple zones of interaction. And what does that really mean for conservation management and planning? So this kind of brings us to the dilemma of trade-offs while some things are gained, others may be lost. So while advocating for different conservation interventions, the full range of possible trade-offs between human livelihoods and conservation may not be explicitly acknowledged or even discussed as interventions are sought. Such as access to these forests is in itself a trade-off to many. Therefore recognizing these trade-offs is important when we think of conserving these forests. So keeping this in mind I ask how socio-cultural values align with different mangrove ecosystem services, especially in protected areas, and how does that differ across genders and diverse stakeholders? So I kind of used Diterkanika Wildlife Sanctuary which is located on the east coast of the country in the state of Odisha as a case study. And partly because this area has a diverse land tenure system, it was under the Zamindari system which is an aristocratic way of collecting land revenue in the form of land taxes until about 1951. It was then declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1975 and then a national park in 1998. That's the core zone of the park which is this area. So but only in 2002 it was also recognized as a Ramso-Wetland site because of the high diversity of mangrove flora found in this region as well as a number of endangered species of fauna found here. And these include crocodile species. It also accommodates the largest nesting area of the olive ridley turtle and numerous bird assemblages. Now although this area seems a little isolated from many of the largest cities of the state, it is heavily populated and surrounded by about 400 villages and thousands of inhabitants. Even then people here live a self-sufficient life owing to paddy fields. This is a paddy field here. Small kitchen gardens, backyard ponds, an example of a backyard pond where the rare fish for their consumption. They also work on shrimp farms. This is an example of a shrimp farm and also collect firewood for their cooking needs. It's important to note here that firewood is usually supplemented with alternate sources of energy like cow dung, rice husks, etc. But it is still a very integral part of the cultural landscape here. So to answer my question, I used a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches. So to understand harvesting pressures on these forests, we assessed how vegetation composition, structure, biomass and carbon stocks vary in areas where harvesting is practiced and where it is not. We sampled a total of 26 plots, each measuring about 10 by 10 meters within seven sides across the sanctuary that represented varying degrees of human access and use. You can read more about the methods and our results in detail by referring to the paper, which was recently published. If you need a copy, please feel free to email me. Then to understand how sociocultural values aligned with mangrove conservation narratives, a combination of survey and interview methods were used. We essentially, a traditional survey that tried to capture gender differences in firewood collection patterns was utilized where a total of 170 participants were asked if they collected firewood for cooking and if they did, whose job was it? We also used a pile sorting exercise where participants placed statements in piles of three, those that they agree with, those that they disagree with and those that they don't particularly have an opinion to share. A list of 30 statements were presented to 40-run participants. These were usually local experts, like members of certain self-help groups or leading forest communities, et cetera, but also included participants like NGOs, NGOs staff, forest officials, researchers that have worked in this area, and so on. The sorts were then analyzed to highlight the spectrum of similarities and dissimilarities between people's responses. So this is an example of the 30 statements that were used. As you can see, the topics covered ranged from ecosystem services of mangrove forest, livelihood opportunities, relations with forest officials, and so on. And just to give you an example about livelihood opportunities, this one year talks about how shrimp farming provides livelihood opportunities and if it's a good source of income for households or not. So participants were essentially asked if the statement was presented, participants put the statement in piles of whether they agreed with or disagreed with or they had a neutral stand. So let's discuss some of these findings to understand how different socio-cultural values and harvesting pressures in this area influence mangrove sustainability in the region. So a traditional survey has investigated how much firewood was collected and who does the collection to get an idea about the harvesting pressures in the forest. So this bar graph here summarizes the number of people broken down by gender who agreed that firewood is indeed used as a fuel source for cooking and among the total individuals that per surveyed 61% agreed versus 40% denied that they use firewood for cooking. So among the pile that agreed, 89% suggested that women are primarily involved in the collection of firewood. Also, an important note here is that while consumption patterns vary, the average value per monthly consumption usually stood around 25 kgs because firewood is almost always supplemented with other forms of fuel sources. Then to understand how harvesting pressures actually impact the mangrove for a structure, composition and carbon stocks, we looked at how these factors varied across harvested areas and non-harvested areas and we found that overall the number of mature trees, saplings and seedlings were lower in harvested areas than in non-harvested areas. Similarly, we also found, this is the plot that shows that individuals were lower in harvested than non-harvested plots. Similarly, we also found that the proportion of total carbon stocks was lower in harvested areas than in non-harvested areas. And that trend kind of stayed the same for both above ground carbon stocks as well as below ground carbon stocks. But when we looked at species differences, we found some interesting results. We found that sites where harvesting was common were largely composed of a mix of species types. You can see this graph here. And these were largely dominated and also these areas were largely dominated by the presence of, say, avicenia afusionalis, as well as sonoraceous, a number of sonoraceous species, whereas non-harvested areas showed a strong presence of exocharia and heritria forms with a number of other rare species. So some key takeaways from the slide here are that that harvesting can not only influence carbon stocks of the forest, but also impact the ecological integrity. If you look at this plot here, we see that a number of mangrove associates like, say, Pungamiya and Sapium Indicum were also found in harvested areas, whereas those were absent in non-harvested areas. So non-harvested areas showed much more presence of true species, mangrove species, than mangrove associates. So this is important to keep in mind. Now, briefly looking into how these different harvesting pressures coincide with socio-cultural values, we used a number of survey methods and interview methods to understand people's views towards mangrove conservation narratives. So we found that the traditional file sorting exercise revealed three distinct perspectives. And when they were compared with interview responses, they provided greater insight on how people value these forests. So the three perspectives comprised aspects of livelihood security, conservation value of mangrove forests and a strong sense of place. So the statements that loaded significantly on the first perspective spoke of how shrimp farming was seen as a lucrative opportunity, as well as the growing migration of village for the cities in search of jobs. The second described the immense storm protection storm protection value of mangroves as well as other ecosystem services. And the third perspective covered aspects of self-identity and emphasized that the sanctuary was their home and they didn't see rehabilitation and relocation packages as an option. Like I mentioned, if you correspond these statements with interview quotes, it kind of gives you a deeper insight into how people value these forests. So for example, this quote here talks about how people recognize the risk involved in shrimp farming. But yet they feel that it is a lucrative opportunity that provides livelihood security. Then the second quote here talks about how deeply people value storm protection services of mangroves. Then coming to how people, whether local people's views aligned with other stakeholders, we just compared how different perspectives, which participants reveal different perspectives. And we found that if you look at this graph here, each bar represents the different group of participants. So A and B refer to male and female villagers respectively. C relates to the officials from NGOs, the government officials, and the researches and academics that have worked in this area. So one of the key takeaways again from this slide is that stakeholders such as researchers, NGO workers and government officials dominated perspective two. That's conservation value for us. Whereas the other two factors, that's livelihood security and strong sense of place, were dominated by villagers. As you can see, factor one, F1 and F3 are loaded significantly on A and B, whereas they show lower loading strength on the rest of the stakeholders. So as mentioned previously, women mainly collected firewood and were involved in activities that didn't contribute to household income, whereas men were the sole breadwinners of the family. Now, these differences and responsibilities brings out certain subtle differences in how men and women perceive and value the forest differently. For instance, when asked if quantity and quality of firewood has declined over the years, women, men kind of denied the use and insisted that they actually use cylinders now and it's actually improving, whereas women kind of reflected and said that we don't cut trees, but we only use dry wood. So it has to do nothing with the quality or quality of the forest. Similarly, some of the responses also indicated an embedded cultural significance of cooking food, especially rice, using firewood. So when presented with compensation schemes and exchange of firewood collection, men were more open to adopt these schemes. However, women often pause to explain that everyone prefers eating rice cooked on the traditional shulhas. Similarly, both men and women preferred food that was cooked on wood-fired cookstores. So just to summarize and whatever we just discussed, we found that harvesting patterns show both ecological degradation and low carbon stocks, but kind of have some potential for conservation opportunities. We also found that women are primarily involved in forest extraction activities and therefore it's kind of crucial for conservation plans to be influences of communities live realities and so involving women and other marginalized communities in decision making is needed for successful outcomes. We also found value perspectives differ among local and extra local interviewees, which brings us to the discussion that on the surface exclusion kind of assumes a reduction in people forest interactions when use still continues. And this is not to say that protected areas are not successful in conserving forests. They work because they have been operational for years in the country, but combining alternate inclusive plans can help them be more successful. For example, community managed wood logs can be an option where communities have access to these areas to sustain their needs and also have the ability to manage these areas without interference. And lastly to note is that people were interested in incentive based programs towards mango consuations, but they also exclaimed that while these incentive based programs were needed, people, you know, officials to recognize their lived realities. So that's it for today and I hope you enjoyed my talk and if you have questions, please feel to get in touch with me. I, my email ID is mentioned in the last slide here. And just before wrapping up for wrapping up this talk, I'd like to acknowledge different people who've contributed in different ways towards my research and without home or without their help and guidance, wouldn't have been possible. So yeah, thank you. And please email me if you have questions. Thank you. So yeah, with that, we came to an end to this talk session. And so since Dina could not join us directly, I request all the participants to put their questions in the Q&A box that will be forwarded to Dina or any panelists or experts in the resource person's list could answer, feel free to answer anything that you could do. And otherwise, all the questions will be forwarded to Dina and Dina's email is there in the presentation. I hope people made a note of it. If you want to keep in touch with her, you can do it by email or we can forward those questions and get the answers. So yeah, so with that, we come to an end to the second session. And so we will be shortly starting the panel discussion. So do we have all the panel members joined us? Vito, can you quickly check? We have professors for that many tasks with us. We have Dr. R. Subramanian. And I believe Professor R. Kiputola will be joining shortly but we can get started. Yes. So yeah, I think I checked with Professor Ruchi and she will be joining us shortly. So we will wait for two more minutes to begin. And once she joined, we will start the panel discussion. Is that okay? So it looks like Dr. Nehru is video is not on. But I believe we have all panel members here. So in the interest of time, we can get started. And I will start by giving a brief introduction of this panel session. We will have three panel members today. And in that we will start with our first speaker, which is Professor Saudamini Das. She is a professor at the Institute of Economic Growth New Delhi and also a fellow of South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics. She worked as Malar Scholar at the Beiser Institute of Ecological Economics, Royal Studies Academy of Sciences, Stockholm during 2011 and 2012. Her research areas are ecosystem services of mangroves, climate change adaptation, assessment of loss and damage to livelihood due to climate change, valuation of ecosystem services, coastal vulnerability analysis, and evaluation of public policy. She has published extensively in high ranking journals like PNAS, World Development, Climate Change Economics, Nature XR, Estuarine and Coastal Sciences. And she has advised students in her illustrious career. So without further ado, I will invite Professor Das and just a brief note to have some time for discussion. We'll really appreciate if you can keep your presentation to the allocated time. Floor is yours, Dr. Das. Thank you. Good morning to all of you. So many friends in the list. So it's a great pleasure to be here and thanks a lot for this invitation. I'm so happy to share my research with all the illustrious people who are there in the panel as well as among the audience. It's a great, great honor to be with you all. So let me just share my screen. I hope this is visible now. Yes, it's visible. Thank you very much. So this is what I'm going to talk about how mangroves are playing a role in building up coastal resilience against natural disaster. And mostly I'll be talking based on my own research. And I hope, you know, if there are any questions in between or, you know, clarificate or anything. So everybody, I'll be very happy people to ask it in between. So let me just go straight to this very preliminary slide. I wanted to show everybody that, you know, how do you say resilience? How do you define this resilience? So there are these four points. There is one line called BP. So this is called the pre-disaster initial condition. Suppose one individual is at this level point B. And then after a disaster, the person can fall back to A or to B. So that means the person is suffering damages. So he or she is losing the well-being and as a result, the economic well-being is going down. If they are reaching point A compared to point B, then point A is called static resilient because they're suffering less. After recovery, they can come to point C or they can come to point D. So they take different paths to recover. So if they're taking either path one or a path two and reaching the pre-disaster situation, the point C very quickly, then they are also called dynamically resilient. So how much you suffer after the disaster and how quickly you recover back is defining your resilience or recovery. So when you have mangroves in a coastal area, as you also see in my slides later on, mangroves are able to provide both static resilience because they reduce the damage during a disaster and they also provide you dynamic resilience because help people to recover quickly. Like after three and four are called the dynamically non-resilient and one and four are called dynamically resilient. So whichever village or households are having mangrove in their coastal distance, they seem to be recovering very quickly. So that is why mangroves are really essential to have in the coastal area so that and like with climate change, the disasters, frequency and intensity are increasing so quickly, so fast. So it's essential that we need to have mangroves to provide resilience to the people. So now why they're resilient? And these are the few things I say in defense of mangroves. Mangroves provide both static and dynamic resilience. They provide lives, properties and livelihoods. They provide fast line of defense during a coastal calamity. Equally effective as well as other non-manmade protection sources. They are the most effective coastal green compared to other coastal vegetation. So if you have any other vegetation in a mangrove habitat, obviously they don't protect like a mangrove. So these are some of the regions which are also based on very careful research that says that it's essential to have mangroves in the mangrove habitat to build up the resilience or to face to adapt to the coastal disasters like storms. These are some of the features are very prominent because of this root structure. Mangroves are able to provide continuous resistant storm source. They act like a wall. They channelize water because they are in the both sides of the water channel. So water do not go here and there. So these are the some of the very prominent features that provide storm protection during a calamity like tsunami and cyclone. So right now I'm going to my first study. This is a very old study. Many of the people in the audience would be knowing about it. I studied the storm protection of mangroves during the super cyclone that came to Orissa in the year 1999. So as you can see here, this bed touch is my study area which was in the thick of the cyclone impact zone. And this diagram from the right tells you that Orissa had a lot many mangroves in 1940s and 1950s. And when the super cyclone came most of it, say 80% of it were destroyed. So one district had all the mangroves gone. And in the Kendrapada district, little mangroves were there. So this bed touch is, as you can see here, nearly half of the mangroves were destroyed when the super cyclone came to Orissa in Kendrapada district. And 100% mangroves were destroyed in the Jagasinpur district that was the cyclone landfall point. So my research question was that these little mangroves that were there in Orissa during the cyclone, did they provide any storm protection? And if the mangroves were not destroyed, who would have been the situation? I tried to examine this, taking human death and also property damages into account. So as you can see here, initially when I plotted the death figures, you can see the only area that did not have death at all were the ones behind the mangrove block, only this area. Whereas we had death beyond the mangrove area, we had also lot of death before that. And when I did a simple tabular comparison, you can see here the entire district had, the average death was, this is the Kendrapada district 0.4 and mangroves to no protection, the death rule was 0.5, mangroves to the more brown group, mangrove protection was 0.1. And there are villages, there are some 92 villages established after cutting down the mangroves. These are the villages in this patch and also in this patch, average death was 1.11. So high, almost every village had a death and villages outside the mangrove habitat, the death was also low. So this made it very clear that probably probably mangroves provided a protection to human lives during the cyclone. So I estimated a cyclone damage function, as you can see, this was a interdisciplinary complicated damage function we estimated and in the model, we had a lot many controls and not going much detail into that. So you can see here that we had controls in the model that control for the physical conditions of the mangrove having cyclone impact, topography, hydrology, infrastructure, social wellbeing, as well as governmental institutions. And from the marginal effect, I tried to measure the death aborted by mangroves. These are some very simple results you can see here in this area. The villages I studied that had the potential to be protected by mangroves, 290 people died and if there are no mangroves, then 603 people would have died. So if you see the difference, mangroves that existed before the cyclone could abort on the 11th day. And if the historical mangroves in the 1940s and 50s were not destroyed, only 31 people would have died. That says 361 deaths could have been aborted, 92% of that could have been aborted if the mangroves were not destroyed. So that was a very strong evidence that mangroves do protect lives during a cyclone when you do not have so many others. Though the government of Croatia did try to evacuate people and also had very few storm shelters during that cyclone, but still mangrove played a very, very crucial role in protecting lives. Then we also tried to examine whether mangroves provide wind protection. This was a study I think that at the first time examine whether mangroves provide storm protection from a cyclonic wind because earlier the hypothesis was that mangroves provide protection from storm surge. So here we try to examine the question of wind protection and we have a special model and this particular model is well explained in our publication that came out in history and coastal self-sciences in 2017. So what we did here, so we took all the villages and for each of the villages we measured the potential cyclonic wind and the potential damage and compared it to the actual damage. And from the difference of the potential damage and the actual damage we tried to measure the volume of storm protection given by the mangroves. And these are the results. You can see here given the cyclonic impact if a particular village is having one at a 94 kilometer wind velocity from the storm the having mangroves will make the damage this much and without mangroves the damage is this much. So the gap very clearly tells you the extent of wind protection provided by mangroves to the houses. As like in 99, 85 percent of the houses in Kendrabara district were kacha structures, mud structures. And still even in spite of that the mud structure houses were protected by the mangroves. And you can see here the higher the impact of the storm more is the gap between the house damage of the non-protected villages and the protected villages. So that tells a lot about the wind protection by the mangroves. And also we tried to compare this for villages very close to the landfill and villages away from the landfill. As you can see here villages close to the landfill had so much of protection. The mangrove protected villages are having continually very, very low damages and this damage is there 30 kilometers from coast. So now then the next in a recent study I'm trying to compare how mangroves are the protection from mangroves are compared to cyclone shelters early warning and also for dykes. This is because you know like we had the super cyclone and we don't have a similar cyclone hitting the area the mangrove areas are treated. So I am trying to reconstitute the 99 situation taking the present scenario three questions I am examining in this particular study with modern cyclone disaster management for to have 100 high investment in manufacturing capital for storm protection are storm protection services of mangrove still valid. Now that we have hundreds of storm shelters are mangroves still important to get storm protection? How does the storm protection by mangroves compared to those from the building capital sources like shelters and early warning are technological substitutes perfect substitutes of regulating or provisioning ecosystem services? These are the three important questions I am trying to examine and to do this I am you know estimating models which are similar to my previous studies and also but more extensive with more data and you know more rigorous so econometric estimation account for the presence of large number of shelters training and knowledge she adding in the model estimate death aborted by mangrove shelter and early warning under different scenarios just giving you know two results so these are the different models not going much into the detail and under different assumptions you can see there are three aborted death I am measuring this one is actual death death in absence of mangrove death in absence of early warning and death in absence of shelter so this is the situation as existed in 1999 and you can see how the bracketed figure these are the bracketed figures death aborted by mangrove and they are very much comparable to death aborted by shelters though early warnings has a much stronger impact but mangroves are also giving you protection which is more or less similar to the protection provided by the shelters then in the next situation I thought okay suppose in 1999 we had the situation the situation in 1999 would have been similar as in 2013 when you had hundreds of you know cycling shelters in Orissa at least here I am accounting for 42 cycling shelters plus 3 cloud shelters in my study area so you shall see how much 95 shelters in those villages as you can see here the protection by mangroves is not coming back to zero they are still important in spite of you do so much of investment in some shelters you have so many and you have so much of early warning dissemination training and you know all villagers are having shelters and shelter management committee that is at village tax force in spite of that mangroves are they do that they are still able to protect some lives and you know which are not so few so that means in spite of all the modern cyclone disaster management you cannot say that mangroves are not important they are still important to provide strong protection and then this is another study where I try to see the you know vulnerability of the villages so I say the villages I am measuring the probability of the super cyclone is hitting the area if the village is having a probability of death which is more than 60 percent they are called vulnerable and if the probability of death is less than 0.006 that means nearly zero then they are called the least vulnerable you can see here the villages most vulnerable are the ones which are established up or down the mangroves the mangrove habitat villages and the villages which are least vulnerable are the ones which are sheltered behind the mangroves so that again says you know how important it is to have mangroves if you retain mangroves you are least vulnerable if you cut down mangroves and have your villages in a mangrove habitat then you are the most vulnerable so that says a lot about how mangroves provide protection to villages during the calamity and also recently this is based on the project which was done by my panelist Dr. Ramesh Subramaniam so I visited in you know one of his project site and we did a perception study and we try to find out what is the perception of mangroves to have that to sea level rise in the present climate change context scenario and you can see here people get the score out of 5 so you can see here they gave a score of 4.3 heroes in prevention mangrove people are so emotionally attached to mangrove and there is so much of demand that mangroves should be planted in the areas which is having open coast and because they feel mangroves will reduce the soil erosion and you know some of the people that did say that now that the mangroves are there we are sure that you are going to survive without the mangroves the sea would have 18 hour houses and similarly they also give a very high score that mangroves indirect contribution to property reduction is 4.4 so that means though mangroves are not directly providing any contribution to reduce property and because they are saving our livelihood they are saving our life that indirect contribution to reduce property is very very high 4 out of 5 and similarly adapting to sea level rise at the villagers feel you know this is so high all the three villages we studied so they gave 4 a score of 4 out of 5 and then to the question whether mangroves should be planted in other areas you know the score was taken very very high yes they should also be planted in other areas so this says the local people also give high priority to mangrove planting and mangrove regeneration to adapt to climate change scenarios this is another study I did in Gujarat where you know I'm just coming back to mangrove regeneration this is the mangrove scenario in India as you can see here like in almost every state the mangrove cover is going up this is the difference in mangrove cover in between 2011 and 1987 but mangrove state of Gujarat has done I think extensively well they have nearly doubled their mangrove coverage over the years I try to see what has been the contribution of these mangroves to the fishery sector of the state I'm not going into those details but maybe I'll just touch up on some of the issues on this mangrove regeneration so like you can see here to start with Gujarat has 854 square kilometers of mangrove in 1939 and by 1990 they were then 873 but the thing is that there's a lot of difference they also destroyed a lot of their mangroves but they also continuously started regenerating mangrove plantation is a continuous scheme in Gujarat since 1950-50s so those mangroves are destroyed in some areas they were regenerated in some other areas so the mangroves were still there and by 2013 the cover has been nearly doubled now the thing is that there are planting mangroves all along the coast I think that is some type need to be taken I have highlighted this you know a box in a red so these are the non mangrove habitat and they're planting mangroves so they're not successful so you can see there the mangrove cover in 1930 and they did not have mangroves in 1990s sorry in 1950s but they started planting in the mud flats but they do not survive whereas in the mangrove habitat the mangrove survived and they're still existing so this is what one really needs to be in the same situation also I try to show here so that you know when we do go for a mangrove regeneration and mangrove planting it's really taken in back out whether the area is a mangrove habitat or not if you do it in mangrove habitat then this is a bogus plantation because they don't survive like in this red bullock block they had seven square kilometers of mangrove in 1990s but they all died so by similarly also in other districts they had 19 square kilometer and by 2013 only 8 square kilometers survived so these are the things that really needs to be taken into account so some of these details are there in the India study that we did for Gujarat state so this needs to be taken into account while doing the mangrove regeneration so now to give you some of this my concluding remark natural buffers like mangrove important role in managing storm leaks which is you know established very very conclusively and this is a globally accepted hypothesis now evacuation has been prioritized reducing leaks to light the concept of resilient building is a bit tough about so now this concept has not taken taken up in India so this increases the importance of natural buffers by mangrove so that will be same storm protection at least from the cycling wind now this is the third point and that's very crucial is that buffers need to be maintained along the post continuous lines until habitat exist patchy buffers can be more damaging if you have mangroves in patchy buffers at least some of my results shows that in those areas which are having this continuous mangrove they try to suffer more so it's essential that we maintain mangroves continuously in all till the habitat exist ecological regeneration and restoration should be preferred convenient restoration wherever you think you know it's convenient to plant mangroves the government is doing that in some of the areas some of the state but that should be avoided ecological regeneration and restoration should be given the parity and then non-habitat plantation should be discouraged you know like wherever you never had a mangrove they should not try to plant mangroves over there so these are some of the great things that I try to share based on my previous results presently I'm not doing much work on mangroves but I thought you know whatever I don't look for I should share with you so I thank you all for listening to my presentation and I stop here Thank you Professor Das thank you for sharing all the details of your USR both from the east coast and the west coast and giving a providing your insights from surveys that you've conducted and in combination with our next speaker Dr. Ramasubramanian which is really good because then it becomes easy it's kind of continuation of the story so our next panel member is Dr. R. Ramasubramanian from MS-Sominathan Research Foundation I'll quickly provide his introduction and then hand it over to Flo to him so Dr. Ramasubramanian completed his doctorate from Centre of Advanced Study in Botany University of Madras before joining MS-SRF in 1996 as scientist and mangrove biologist he has carried out extensive biophysical surveys in Godavari and Krishna mangrove wetlands of Andhra Pradesh and played an important role in executing mangrove restoration activities jointly with stakeholders such as local community forest department and NGOs in Andhra Pradesh this has led to restoration of about 900 hectares of mangrove he has authored various books and manuals particularly mangrove identification manual and mangrove nursery and mangrove restoration techniques are widely used by forest department field staff he has trained a large number of community members as well as forest department staff on mangrove silviculture practices he has also authored a lot of paper almost 20 fear review publication in journals and co-authored five books and print chapters so we have great pleasure of having you sir with us and I hand over to you to share your insights and thoughts just quick mention try to stay within that allocated time thank you sir thank you very much for the organizers providing this opportunity and sharpening screen is it visible yes can we make it full screen please yes it's good to go so mangroves are very important coastal resources especially to the additional fishermen who are all depending on the livelihood because the coastal and you would be seeing a lot of small fishermen they used to go inside the mangrove forest to either by walk or small and non-motorized boats so they will be harvesting these citizens' resources for their livelihood so apart from that many ecosystem services more than 70 ecosystem services mangroves provide most important is livelihood as well as the bio-shield function of the mangroves because of the extensive root system if you see the mangrove root system this around some of the root systems you can see the maize-like structures because of these and these plants are able to extend the high wind velocity of more than 200 km per hour just now Solomonidas as mentioned about super cyclone in Larissa so because of this root system these plants are able to extend the wind speed as well as the water velocity apart from that it provides shelter to juvenile fisheries which actually gives a lot of opportunity for the coastal communities so yesterday it appears we have lost connection Vita, can you be here? Yes, I think Dr. Rama's Subramanian has lost his internet connection he's back now yeah Dr. Rama Subramanian I think you are muted you have to share your screen again yeah sorry something went wrong so probably earlier now it is visible yes please carry on yeah this slide have you seen that there is some issue yeah we are seeing distribution of mangroves in India so if you want to yeah this slide Dr. Kadirajan and others yesterday spoke about the carbon sequestration potential of the coastal resources and once these resources are destroyed or removed the whatever the carbon stored inside the soil will be emitted so it will add to the carbon budget to the atmosphere so this is about the extent of mangrove we have we have mangroves in both east and west coast as well as in Andhra Manneke Paravilands so I am not going to into the details so if you see the mangrove wetland somewhere in 1980s or 90s more than 50 percent of the area are all degraded because of various reasons so one of the reasons was the post management practices till 1978 mangrove forest were cut down by the government to meet the fuel requirement of the community so because of these feelings some of the areas were not able to regenerate on its own and due to various reasons apart from that the local community still now depends on the mangroves for their domestic needs as well as some of the livestock especially in Krishna and Badavari district to see more than 2000 cattle will be residing inside the mangroves they will be grazing and the farmers used to go in a boat and defy the milk but now it has come down due to various issues like one is forest department is enforcing a very strict measures but from that they are also feeling cumbersome in going into the mangroves and bringing milk so changes in the land use is one of the major factor in producing the mangrove extent number nine in India but also in all of the all over the world especially in South Asian countries the major factor to the mangroves apart from that and the culture industries and other habitations also the and the established and inside the mangroves some of the natural causes like changes in the topography actually during monsoon sediments are being brought and possibly along the river as well as in trees and it prevents the tidal water flow inside the mangroves and some of the river miles because of lack of a lot of quantum of freshwater they have been closed so which will reduce the freshwater flow as well as the tidal water flow so because of that some of the mangroves have been integrated cyclones during 1977 we had Divisima cyclone in Krishna district of Karnataka as well as in recent Bajah in 1970 we had in Mithupit similarly in Nargis these cyclones also have damaged if you see in Mithupit large area have been destroyed so similarly in Nargis more than 58,000 hectares of mangroves have been destructed even Andaman and Sonami more than 20 square kilometers of mangroves have been destroyed so climate change is also one of the major cause for mangrove loss should die back this is a report that I will be showing you this is how the local community is depending on the mangroves from their area as well as their domestic needs these are some of the practices of land use very close to the mangroves and where are the mangroves were there in private land as well as the revenue land that they were cleared for aquaculture for habitation so because of these large areas especially in Andhra Pradesh have been reduced because of aquaculture so there is lack of coordination because the government itself have given permission to start aquaculture in their own lands so they have cleared their mangroves and started aquaculture so there is lack of coordination because in the revenue records if you see there is mention of what only Westland or some wetland they are not put as the mangroves so but now due to awareness as well as a lot of PIL and other duties regressions some of these mangroves are not back to be fulled so this is the satellite imagery of Badawari Delta where they have been working for more than 20 years so left turn is 1986 and right side is 2001 you can see this area this area during 90s 1990s there were mangroves but later in 2000 large area of mangroves were cut down and aquaculture have been cut here because of some of the land the government has provided rights to the local community to start up this aquaculture as well as some of the permanent lands earlier we they were with mangroves they were allowed to plant and started doing aquaculture so this is one study kind of same place so you can see in 1977 large mangroves were there and 1999 most of these mangroves were cleared and aquaculture has been stopped so earlier in 1990s India we lost about 40,000 percent of mangrove area in India so of which if you see in Andhra India is together with the street alone more than 2197 hectares of mangroves have been destructed for aquaculture so you can see the area very close these mangroves were covered for aquaculture then some of the areas naturally natural vegetation as well as these are the areas mangrove artificial plantation have been done and let us talk so this is the status of mangroves of Krishna Delta in 1986 and 2001 if you compare and large areas of mangroves were cleared for aquaculture you can see this area large areas were permitted for aquaculture so this is about the kaja cyclone we had in Muthupet in 2018 this is before the kaja you can see the mangroves lining along the coast as well as in this area so after cyclone in 2018 we preserved the image and the forms and large areas of mangroves have been and destructed the same thing these are the Google image you can see the dense mangrove planted mangrove in Muthupet in January 2018 and this is the image of February 2020 where still large area of mangroves were destructed so the co-pacing capacity of these mangroves are not good due to various reasons even though Abyssinia is one of the best co-paces in mangroves in spite of that these mangroves so could not be come back on this way so this is how the these are some of the photographs of the cyclone Baja which has impacted Muthupet so large trees have been fallen down only very few species are able to focus so this is the due to sea level rise as Dr. Sivamur has pointed out this is the Badawari Delta where because of sea level rise and wave action some of the mangroves along the coast were being eroding at an alarming rate so this is the picture taken in Bichawaram mangroves where they were lost due to lack of proper tidal flushing as well as raising temperature because of these some of the mangroves in Tamil Nadu both Muthupet and Bichawaram were affected so MS Omanathan Research Foundation as well as the State Forest Department so initiated mangrove conservation measures by restoring some of the degraded areas through canals so we are done canals we have raised necessary involving the local community so local community played a major role in mangrove restoration so we have planted the mangrove saplings along the canals and this is the process we are followed we mobilized the community we have built their capacity to plant mangroves we have taken them to the villages where these systems are being placed so we added by the area for planting then we prepared a joint plan and implemented that so this is a difficult area in the Krishna district where large areas of mangroves were felt the area could not come on its own so we dug canals like this during high tide water enters if you see the poor water suddenly there it was more than 100 feet so because of that nothing except a few halophiles like sweda nothing has gone so we dug canals like this during high tide water enters and during low tide it receives due to this tidal flushing some of the salts that removed and it has become a conducive environment for the mangroves to do so this is another area in Badawara delta these are all the sweda you can see only halophiles in those areas this is a Krishna area it is about more than 200 hectares so we dug trabicide alkanons like this and we have planted mangroves so this is how the local community is involved in nursery as well as mangrove restoration works so we have done mangrove restoration in 2003 in a village called Badi Moga in Badawara district you can see after 10 years we got about 6 to 7 feet of mangroves and now you see the image of the 2021 Google Earth almost this area has been completely restored similarly you can see large areas of plantations done by the forest department you can see the rows and also like this so these are all the mangrove restored areas by the forest department having a relationship so this is again we did it in Krishna district you can see the these are all our mangrove plantations they are already 10 years old and now it has become almost a thick forest cover so coming to the mangrove cover of the other days during 1987 and now in Andhra had about nearly 495 square kilometers of mangroves and due to aquaculture large areas as already told most of the areas in the remedy as well as the private lands they are committed to aquacforms because of that the extent as fallen down to 325 square kilometers somewhere in 2001 but due to natural regeneration as well as the efforts of the forest department as well as Mr. Sarra it has come around 400 square kilometers in 2005 in 2009 so these are some of the areas side of the image as I feel a land use land cover of 2000 you see larger dignitary areas we have here inside the mangrove forest have been completely restored through artificial designation this is the 2020 image and this is in Krishna you can see in Krishna in 1996 and the extent of moderate density of mangroves was around 7000 hectares if you see the image of 2020 almost it has become double now the modern dense mangrove power is about 15000 hectares so this is the FSA data they have been producing for about two years so the other day if you see I told you from 495 it has come to 329 2003 now it has regained nearly to 404 but if you see the other states like Gujarat it was 427 and now it has increased almost to three fours that is 1200 so some of the states like Maharashtra Odisha they are all improved and Tamil Nadu also because they are around particularly speckled meters now it has become double one day in Andhra Pradesh and Andhra Manj had slightly reduced mangrove power only about 1987 so the increase in forest cover in the recent years is due to both natural as well as natural restoration carried out by the different agencies so apart from that the dependency on the mangroves by the local community have also calmed down due to area they were using for house construction but now almost all the villages have permanent houses so they are not depending on the housing for timber then like that the dependency even for people who are them most of them have been using only in villages houses and other things apart from that sea level rise also helped to increase the mangrove cover because some of the elevated areas now receive tidal water flow of about 2 to 3 inches because of that those areas now started region renting on its own one major mangrove cover increase is due to abandoning of shrimp ponds in the revenue lands so because of which for diseases so that also major cost for increase in the mangrove cover apart from that strict enforcement of loss CRZ and NGT played a major role regaining some of the lands for mangrove and awareness also now increased among the community so these are the images where you can see the abandoned shrimp ponds having lot of mangroves in both Krishna as well as Kupadawari data and this is about the images of Kuchawaran where in 1988 we had about 400 hectares of mangroves but now if you see it as increased to 795 percent we almost just doubled one of the other major issue is the reduction in the freshwater flow this is the Krishna delta in 1951 the mangroves received nearly 60 cubic kilometers of water but due to the construction of different dams so now it has almost reduced to 5 cubic kilometers because of these large areas of mangroves have been stunted because the the silent level in soil as well as in the water has been increased even the sediment flow which is very much required because sediments carry a lot of nutrients as well as build the etchery because of lack of fresh water flow with the sediments now the mangroves of Krishna is in Starway Dr. Ramasupramanian it's very interesting but just two minutes I will be closing this is about the future of mangroves so this is my last slide so some of the gaps actually nobody is very much clear how much fresh water flow is essential so it has to be carried out for different estuaries then wherever the areas are suitable those areas should be worked and restored so among the different players are there the revenue department has some area so there should be a coordination to protect these mangroves so even if you see a lot of areas are unprotected so it has to be coming it has to brought to a common pool so that it can be particular value so apart from that aquaculture farmers also should be encouraged to plant mangroves then bar mod closer to seven of the major issue has to be tackled to get a good fresh water flow as well as the entire water flow then some of the communities are depending on mangroves for the domestic needs that needs to be addressed then invasion of crops will be prominent in some of the estuaries like Mokved then in Krishna that has to be over thank you very much this is my last slide thank you Dr. Mosef Amalayan it's it's very very illustrious presentation and I think it's important that your presentation cover two important topics that came up yesterday there was a question about someone asking whether these canals were dead by hand and you had a picture with the with the person digging the canals so I think that answers the one of the question another important thing that we discussed yesterday was about restoring hydrology and how and why this is important so that was clearly highlighted it was very very interesting and insightful so without further ado let's move on to our next panelist which is Professor Ruchi Bhatola from Wailaf Institute of India she is a senior professor and heads the department of eco-development planning and participatory management at WII Theradun she has conducted applied research on various aspects of Wailaf management and eco-development planning human Wailaf conflict mitigation valuation of ecosystem services livelihood development covering almost all states within the country she has developed management plans for seven wetlands of conservation importance in the states of Manipura Bihar, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand she has developed and implemented pioneer training programs in human dimensions of Wailaf conservation and she has published over more than hundred peer-reviewed articles in general and international journals of international repute books and book chapter so it is our great pleasure to have her here and share her views on the biodiversity aspect of mangroves perhaps and and why that is important the floor is yours Prakash Badal Thank you very much Dr. Rupesh and it is a great opportunity for me to reflect on some of my mangrove work which was done largely in Odisha and I will be talking about from the community part of it because my work largely focused on the community part of the mangrove work let me share my presentation so I think it is yeah so basically if we look at the global distribution of mangrove loss and its drivers in our part of the world the major drivers of mangrove loss have been the demand for commodities that is extraction of resources and conversion particularly along the east coast of India if we see rather than you know extreme weather events or erosion of course those have been important but it has largely been the demand for the mangrove resources as well as the conversions into other uses we do realize that mangroves provide a critical ecosystem services some of which have been reflected by my previous colleagues and very important are the regulating services that mangroves provide and our work on mangroves actually initiated with looking at some of these important regulating services including the storm protection nutrient retention and contribution to the fisheries in the area and if we look at some of the important studies there are studies which have documented the ecosystem value of selected regulation functions of mangroves including Dr. Soudamani's excellent work on storm protection in which she has really made a lot of contribution in you know contributing to this field of mangrove functions and apart from that global studies but the point is that despite this I would say that we do not have a large number of studies on these you know these are some of the important studies that I'm saying here but there are not many many more studies on these dimensions so I will briefly go into our own work in Bitar Kanika and as you are well aware that Bitar Kanika is one of the second largest mangrove areas of the country in the east coast and now the mangrove areas are largely confined into the sanctuary area which is about 150 square kilometers and a large number of villages are situated in this area more than 300 villages and people in these villages are poor and lack of access to basic facilities family income being low and most of them are also settlers from the neighboring states so the stakes become you know very different and they are using the different mangrove species in different ways for meeting their day to day requirements as well as for you know earning their livelihoods so right from timber, firewood hatching material to weaving material it is being used and these are some of the uses to which mangroves are being put in this area and even from the sanctuary area there is a dependence for biomass by the local people including fuel, wood, fish, timber, honey and other products and which is very very important contributor to the income of these people here and you can see that even for you know commercial purposes some of these resources I mean livelihood purposes I will not say commercial but market purposes some of these resources are being extracted and of course as we move away from the sanctuary area where the mangroves are there the resource used declines by the people declines and our studies actually we looked at five major functions of mangroves regulating as well as provisioning services of mangroves of which protection from storms was one of the first function that we looked at and very interestingly what we found was what we found was totally in tune and this was the first empirical study on storm protection function of mangroves we did find that where with the villages which were provided protection by mangroves were actually there was no loss of life reported from there but what interesting thing that we found because we Dr. Sadamani did talk about replacing a natural ecosystems with human created you know systems to provide the same services which is more expensive but in terms of effectiveness it was very interesting to see that wherever the villages were protected by the dyke it is the same super cycling of 1999 there was a lot of loss of property you know in terms of loss to crops and houses and property of people because the storm water once it came into the villages with a huge surge it did not have the same strength to go out and the water remained in the villages for two to three weeks and there was a lot of economic loss again we did another study on nutrient retention functions of mangroves and it is well known and well documented soils on which mangroves are there are very rich in nutrients and we conducted our study in Hittarkanika area both in areas which had mangroves now and in areas from which mangroves had been removed and we found that the per hectare value of NPK three important you know constituents nutrients per hectare which exceeded in the mangrove soil was very very high as compared to the areas from which mangroves had been removed and in fact this paper has been published in coastal I'll just let you know in one of the which is that coastal science and estuaries journal and but the interesting part is we had a very tough time in trying to convince regarding this function because we had taken you know these examples from the agriculture producers how much the production was there in areas near mangrove forest and in areas far from mangrove forest without using any kind of chemical fertilizers and we found that the agriculture productivity near the you know in agricultural areas which were located near the mangrove forest was very high as compared to those which were located far away from mangrove forest and ultimately with a lot of to and through this document was accepted after going through a lot of experts because there are people have different views on this particular function of mangroves apart from that it is again well known that mangroves provide very very important nursery as well as other services for coastal fisheries and in this case we had you know taken the trawler fisheries as well as inshore fisheries in trawler fisheries we found that the fish catch off the coast of Gahir Mata and was 17 times higher as compared to the fish coast catch in Paradeep areas from where mangroves had been removed and in terms of species also it was much richer as compared to the areas from which mangroves did not exist now the role of inshore fishery which is you know for subsistence purposes and was mainly being followed by the women and children had very very important contribution for the daily livelihood requirements of the local communities who live in those areas and this is the function I was talking about that how agriculture production in you know agricultural land near and far from mangroves was significantly different and this is documented I'll give you the reference again we also wanted to look at the perception of people how they were perceiving because it was a very difficult situation in Bitar Kanika area because people were dependent on these areas but they were only using these resources de facto because it is a protected area and the use is restricted and we really wanted to know how they perceived the ecological services as well as the use values of these mangroves we found that of course protective functions fared very high but as were important the provisioning services that mangrove forests were providing to these local people and people were willing to cooperate particularly those people who were living in close proximity to these areas who were willing to cooperate with the forest department and any agency who wanted to work for this restoration of mangroves provided their own livelihood requirements were you know were secured as well as people who were basically engaged in agricultural and fishing were also more willing to cooperate with the forest department and other agencies working for mangrove restoration and conservation we found that people were aware of their responsibility but you know as people do not want to go rub the you know the systems in the wrong way they did not admit that they were facing a problem in terms of the protected status of the forest but they wanted they were aware of the protected status they were willing to cooperate and particularly female awareness was very very low as in terms of any kind of committees or initiatives that were taken up for restoration of mangroves or for community participation Dr. Subramaniam has talked about their intensive work an excellent work which they have done to community participation but women's participation and awareness remained an issue in these areas similarly when we looked at some of our studies from the other states in terms of perception of local communities people are well aware of this you know community of the important functions of the mangroves to their lives and livelihoods but the only issue is how they are going to participate what are these models what are these decentralized models of participation for the local communities which are available in some of the areas where intensive work has been done by you know agencies such as MS Swaminath Foundation they have been able to restore and create these institutions but in other places a lot of work in these dimensions continues to remain and if we look at the gaps that exist in terms of research we do not have important indices for different areas in terms either of mangrove species or even of biodiversity again we have gaps in utilizing community knowledge for conservation local local knowledge local traditional knowledge again there are few estimates available at the micro level on the types of goods and quantities extracted process or sold or what value additions are possible and what are being done there are lack of holistic studies in terms of cost and benefit analysis of communities from different parts of the country in terms of technology although we do have platforms for coordination in terms of MFF program or the you know the the Bay of Bengal program for coordination but a lot of impact of these coordination international level coordination at the grass root level remains to be seen there is there is a lot of scope for transfer technology transfer to the communities for adoption of alternate livelihoods you know the government agencies such as Department of Science and Technology have taken very very important initiatives for transfer of technologies for livelihood enhancement and ecosystem maintenance for other ecosystems but there is a huge gap in their work in terms of the mangrove ecosystem again use of advanced technology in ecological studies and few technological intervention in dissemination of information we still rely on the disaster background in fact I'm aware of Dr. Sodamani's excellent work in terms of role of you know information dissemination technology for such ecosystem I think she's done it for disaster but if we were to do it as a normal course of action and we have a lot of example I mean we have excellent example from our country what we can achieve by proper technology transfer in terms of awareness which would require in such areas not only advanced technology but revival of traditional technologies for community awareness and all these information failures actually result in a policy gap which is still a lack of coordination unclear policy objective at different peers and departments of governments again lack of systematic involvement of local communities in decision making still a gap in accounting of income generated by mangroves in state level and national statistics and again no clear linkages of ecosystem services with human well-being and social economic value maybe the only few studies that Dr. Sodamani has been able to demonstrate and the studies by the MS Swaminathan foundation but a huge gap still exists so we probably among other things we need to you know work at various levels at the community level identification of resource lose groups with varying dependency appropriate institutional models for benefit sharing etc harnessing the positive attitudes even when they are fan-sitters is very important and involvement of women again mangrove restoration using advanced technology in terms of awareness and reduction of biotic pressures on these particular habitats cooperation with international partners preparation of scientific management plans we do have management plans existing for almost all these areas working plans but how much it involves the role of policy makers and stakeholders we really need to critically examine and more research on the productivity of the mangrove dependent system and their contribution to the economy so thank you and with this we remain open to questions thank you professor Badullah this was a very very good presentation and ideally like how you kind of identified sort of gap areas some of the failures in information and technology which lead to policy failures and then you highlighted the way forward that that is what we are here to to discuss these and deliberate upon we have crunch of time like yesterday I was thinking I will do better but all the presentations and information were interesting and it didn't feel like you can cut short but we have some time to to have discussion and some questions most of the questions in QA box have already been answered so I thank all the resource people for taking time for typing and answering those questions live once again I like all of our speakers and panel members for a very interesting presentations and information sharing to start the discussion for a limited duration that we have now I'll like to go back to Mr. Vasudevan because there was a comment or a question from one of the panel members who could not post it on QA box and this was from Meenakshi would you like to ask your question Meenakshi or should I would you want me to to ask for you I can go ahead and ask the question was to Mr. Vasudevan about the about the legal status of like mangrove trees in India so I was just wondering because I read in the CRZ but probably this was an earlier notification that mangroves come on their zone one and hence they're not allowed to be cut what is the current status of this and does this mean that there's no like mangroves are not allowed to be cut at all or and what happens if mangroves are growing in private land or revenue land how does the forest department intervene in such cases or I mean it can be addressed to any resource person here I don't see him here so maybe he's there yeah please go ahead I would just comment on this because what I understand from this is it depends on the status of the land on which the mangroves are there if it is a protected area then of course nothing is allowed if it is a forest area it again depends on what is permissible if it is a reserve forest or a protected forest whatever is permissible or not and if it is private land then of course the tree act of the state would apply that is my understanding but if anybody can add on to this private ownership is a major issue in Kerala Karnataka as well as in Maharashtra actually you know in Kerala one BFO he purchased the private lands for the forest department and started protecting them so like that it is very difficult to grab the private land and unless otherwise you know we give some money without incentives it is very difficult to purchase by the forest department this is the current state thank you so much linking question so like in the case of Andaman islands where there was a subsidence because of the tsunami there is like mangrove recolonization and some of these subsided lands so in this case it's growing in like people's agricultural fields that were once there like functional agricultural fields but then at the same time the island protection zone notification says that like these are areas that should be protected so I yeah it's a bit confusing in terms of the gap of both policy knowledge and on-ground implementation so this is where the origin of my question comes from thank you Meenakshi yeah then that's a very interesting question and I actually saw that first and very recently during my last visit to Andaman islands for the sampling trip and Dr. Neruk and perhaps say something he has a much longer experience about Andaman islands on this one but my understanding is that the previous farm lands or agricultural farms which got subsided and mangroves are coming up in those cases there was some I cannot vouch for the efficiency of the process but some sort of reset like you know settlement happened government did provide some compensation for those farm owners whose land was subsided or hence made unproductive we can talk about whether it was a fair compensation how good it was then and all those things but there was this process and once that is sort of settled then they do not have an ownership of that land and then whatever the norms or regulations are under the coastal zone protection or mangroves that can take place however I do know not everyone agreed in terms of getting that compensation and they still hold that land so this is a little bit complex issue but Dr. Neruk wants to add something to that like Rupesh has mentioned it's a kind of a complex issue and more or less it is even some people have given up their land and got the compensation but as far as my understanding goes they when others who did not claim the compensation they also joins with them to reclaim their lands so and there is a probably a gap in implementation of policy so that may be pretty much common in many places as well so as far as in Andaman those who haven't got their compensation the policy is still kind of it's in a kind of a gray area so it's like there is no clear steps have been taken so the situations in mainland India could be quite different than how it is in Andaman because this is a kind of a very unique situation where croplands or human settlements were taken over and it does become intertidal whereas in the mainland you don't at least see that kind of situation or you don't have the land use what this land is so in Andaman you have lands that are still you know you don't know where to put them in the records so you don't have the issues in the mainland so the issues in mainland are quite different yeah Thank you questioner I think we can continue with our conversation it's an exciting topic and we all are mango lovers so I know time time is not crunch essentially for us but for a lot of participants and a lot of busy people I know we need to come to a closure of this interesting session so what I'll do is I will quickly do a wrap-up of today and then we will call it a closure and we have to meet again tomorrow to continue our discussion so this will give us some time for reflection so today's team was mangroves for coastal resilience and biodiversity conservation this is where we wanted to sort of bring together some voices people who are working in mangrove ecosystems these coastal areas on aspects which are not directly focusing on carbon sequestration and I think we did it very successfully we had a wide variety diversity of speakers talks, experiences covering not only biodiversity aspects from say bento to pelagic in Dr. Poonsil of father's talk but also about the social economic aspects that was covered by our speakers in their talks as well as in the panel discussion we started off with a very good welcome address by Professor Sivakumar and he presented his own personal anecdote from his visits and his work which was very encouraging he also identified some of the key aspect when at a landscape level water is damp or freshwater supply is curtail it not only hampers the estuarine environment because of freshwater diminishing freshwater supply but also suffocates the life because the essential nutrients are also trapped and that has implications on biodiversity on livelihoods the whole food cycle the food chain and food that ecosystem so with that with that great start then we moved on to our keynote speaker Dr. Vasudevan who has a great experience working in working or we say establishing the mangrove the only mangrove settled in India in Maharashtra and we continued there for eight years and although he was very modest in claiming this as a success story but we all know it was a great success story in terms of increasing the mangrove cover in Maharashtra what are the legal and policy and institutional changes that has to be made or creative solutions have to be derived to achieve that so this provides a good primer for other states or even countries how do you tackle those complex issues because as such these landscapes these coastal seascapes are heavily populated in many many many places and a lot of services or benefits are derived with people so they are these contesting claims on these resources and how do you tackle them something with a good political support it seems easy but it it takes time to to gather that political support to to drive that confidence and then carry on this so we thank Mr. Vasudevan for sharing that story then we had our first speaker Professor Punsilov Baderi from ISA Polkata and he dealt deeper into the complexity at the biological level looking sort of at the at a finer detail level I would say microscopic to a little bit microscopic level connecting the benthic and pelagic organism how these flow of nutrients energy occurs at the juncture of this where freshwater meets the coastal in this very productive ecosystem that's where the mangroves thrive and he shared examples from his work from Sundarvans and he highlighted the importance of long-term time series data if we need to understand these ecosystems in a better way in a holistic manner we need to not just have one or two sampling event taking snapshot but a long-term monitoring of these systems how these systems are changing how the organism are behaving across the seasons or at an annual or by annual level and if we have a good time series data we show the graph on salinity which is an important predictor of a lot of functions in that area so those kind of efforts need to be taken then we have a recorded presentation from Dina Resguana she's a doctoral student and she talked about the importance of mangroves taking us to Bithirkanika area Bithirkanika and Gahid Matha essentially that part of eastern India ISA affected quite a lot in today's discussions which is very good because that's the area I personally visited and also and that some work so very close to my heart and she shared the important value of mangroves as a firewood provider of firewood or fuel wood and other users that it is used she highlighted three important aspects one is the livelihood security second is the conservation value and then strong sense of space or place for the people's perception toward mangroves then we moved on to our panel discussion where first talk was by Professor Sadamini Das and her pioneering work in putting an economic value of mangrove is legendary as was highlighted a couple of times that we hardly see good number of studies putting some values economic valuation of these mangroves what kind of security or what kind of role they play in events like a super cyclone of Orissa and how learning or knowing more about wind pattern wind damage called by cyclone and how mangroves can protect against that gives us a good understanding a solid foundation for policy makers to formulate protection and conservation laws for mangroves then Dr. Ramasubramanian presented some of his experience and learnings from the practical aspect of restoring mangroves so he started off with some of the reasons how mangroves can be degraded destroyed anthropogenic as well as sometimes natural causes natural causes which are highlighted due to climate change which is because of anthropogenic reasons so and some of the successful areas of restoring mangrove sites how do you identify which are the sites where restoration should place that should take place and what needs to be done how do you mobilize community how do you find ways to generate livelihood option for the community while you are restoring mangroves so looking this as more associated logical complex system not just working mangrove individuals and then lastly we had Professor Chitatola from WIFI and she highlighted the provisioning and regulatory services many ways for sustaining the communities that live in these coastal environment the economic valuation of mangrove services therefore provides a very good reason to formulate policies that are helpful in long-term sustenance of these coastal environments she highlighted some of the technological and knowledge gaps and how we can address them to to basically address the policy level gaps so to make informed decisions to ensure that mangroves are accounted in national accounting the incomes that they provide the services they provide are not forgotten so we had a very sort of wholesome presentation and a good amount of discussion I believe in question and answer in the form of question and answer a lot of interesting questions were asked a lot of responses provided so I feel this is a very good second day and I before concluding this this day I would like to thank all participants for their active engagement and participation asking questions and trying to show their interest in learning more about the information and the knowledge about mangroves I also like to thank all our speakers and panel members for their time their contributions sharing their wisdom knowledge and I like to say that we have one more day of this interesting discussions tomorrow tomorrow's theme will be about recent advances in mangrove research in future perspective so we'll try to look from the lens of what we know already and what we still need to know so what are the directions we need to follow to advance our understanding of these ecosystems and how do we forge new collaborations new partnerships and how do we address some of the challenges that lies in front to achieve that successfully so with that I would like to thank everyone and I will call this today's session to a close thank you all