NCF is happy to be an official partner in the 30th Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation, which will be held in Goa, India, between the 27th and 29th of April 2010.

The Nicobar Islands are biologically unique as they encompass a variety of ecosystems. Indigenous islanders extract natural resources using traditional systems of ownership and management. The overall aim of this project is to understand the influence of post-tsunami change on cooperative behaviour and sharing of natural resources amongst these indigenous communities, from the perspective of conservation and management of natural resources.

Seagrasses are marine angiosperms which serve as good bioindicatots of environmental change. In this study, we propose to formulate an integrated monitoring protocol, both to monitor environmental health, as well as manage seagrass ecosystems in the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay.

The Irrawaddy dolphin restricts itself to narrow ecological niches, often competing with humans for space and resources. This is reflected by the fact that throughout its range of occurrence, the most significant direct threats to the dolphin are due to fishing. The aim of this study is therefore to analyse human-Irrawaddy dolphin interactions, with a special focus on how foraging behaviour is affected by fishing at Chilika lagoon.

Quantifying the response of the reef ecosystem to the 1998 bleaching event at local and regional scales is an important component of this project. The first component of the project aims to draw a broad picture of the variability in reef responses to mass bleaching. To this end, we are using rapid techniques to examine the current status of the benthic (coral, algae, and the diverse sessile fauna that thrive on reefs) and fish communities across the Lakshadweep Islands. A patchy picture emerges from the initial analysis, with some reefs recovering well after the bleaching, with thriving coral and fish communities, and others moribund and not showing many signs of recovery.

Coral reefs are highly effective canaries of global change. Thriving in the warm waters of the tropics, hard corals respond rapidly to unusual fluctuations in oceanic temperature by bleaching white. In recent times, extensive mass bleaching and coral mortality has been reported from reefs in all tropical oceans, apparently triggered by severe El Niño events. Our work in in understand this phenomenon as focused on the Lakshdweep island reefs.