Abstract
The Aerial Bay group of Islands are one of the diverse environments of Andaman & Nicobar Islands, where the coral reefs degraded much due to the natural calamity of tsunami on 26 December 2004. After this event, the entire North Andaman Islands got elevated, which resulted in the exposure of coral reefs during low tide, causing mass mortalities and destructions to this pristine environment. In order to understand the current status, bio-physical monitoring of coral reefs was carried out and compared with classified coral map of pre-tsunami period. A decline from 411.14 to 68.25 hectares (ha) of live coral area was observed in the Aerial Bay group of Islands. The dead corals and other abiotic factors (sand, mud and rubble) were observed to be 317.33 and 25.56 ha respectively, based on comparisons between ground truthed and classified pre-tsunami coral map (2004) processed in ArcGIS®. The detrended correspondence analysis of coral life form categories showed maximum cover of dead coral with algae, in comparison with the live corals. Bray-curtis cluster analysis revealed three different groups of study sites with 60 % similarity based on life-form categories within the coral reef environment.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support given by the Earth System Science Organization (Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India) to conduct this research. We thank Dr. M.A. Atmanand, Director, National Institute of Ocean Technology (Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India), Chennai, India for his constant encouragement and support to conduct this work. We thank Dr. M. Vijayakumaran (Consultant), Prof. T. Subramoniam (INSA Scientist) and Dr. G. Dharani (Scientist D), NIOT, Chennai, India for their critical review. We also thank the scientific and supporting staff of ANCOST, NIOT, Port Blair, India for their support in the field as well as in the laboratory.
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Jha, D.K., Vinithkumar, N.V., Marimuthu, N. et al. Field and GIS based post-tsunami assessment of Scleractinian coral cover in the Aerial Bay group of Islands, North Andaman, India. J Coast Conserv 17, 671–677 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11852-013-0266-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11852-013-0266-z