Manual for Identification of Seagrasses in India

Seagrasses are marine angiosperms found to occur in shallow marine waters such as estuaries, lagoons, bays, and along the continental shelf, playing an important role in maintaining the biodiversity and overall health of coastal and marine ecosystems. Misreporting some temperate species in tropical waters, pure freshwater species as seagrasses, false documentation of certain identical seagrass species are some of the common issues faced by the researchers undertaking seagrass research in India. Studies have also made a passive remark on certain species without making any significant effort to accurately and precisely identify the seagrass species. The major problem encountered by many seagrass researchers or other researchers who found seagrasses during their survey on fisheries, coral reefs, or mangrove ecosystems is generally the lack of keys for proper identification of seagrasses. The concept of this book is to provide a comprehensive and extensive identification key for Indian seagrasses, as access to earlier studies are found to be very limited. There was variation in certain species characteristics with its ecology and association, the addition of certain features, records of new species, ecological variations, reports of seagrasses from different parts of the country. The identification manual will be useful for the scientific, research, and student community to properly document the seagrass species and the possibility of recording new species from our country.