Research Article Volume 2 Issue 4 - May 2017 DOI: 10.19080/OMCIJ.2017.02.555595 Organic & Medicinal Chem IJ Copyright © All rights are reserved by Arpita Saha Evaluating and Ranking the Threats in the Indian Mangrove Forest Adjacent to Bangladesh Sundarbans Arpita Saha* 1 , Tanmay Ray Chaudhuri 1 , Sufia Zaman 1 , Prosenjit Pramanick 1 , Abhishek Saha 1 and Abhijit Mitra 2 1 Department of Oceanography, Techno India University, India 2 Department of Marine Science, University of Calcutta, India Submission: May 02, 2017; Published: May 30, 2017 * Corresponding author: Arpita Saha, Department of Oceanography, Techno India University, West Bengal, Salt Lake, Sector V, Kolkata 700091, India, Email: Introduction Figure 1: Map of Indian Sundarbans with major estuaries. The Indian Sundarbans lies at the apex of the Bay of Bengal and include the areas boarding the Hooghly, Muriganga, Saptamukhi, Thakuran, Gosaba, Vidya, Matla and Harinbhanga estuaries, known as the Hooghly- Matla estuarine complex (Figure 1). The mangrove forests of the Indian Sundarbans have been variously estimated at 418,888 hectares [1,2], 200,000- 300,000 hectares [3], and at 426,300 hectares by the Forest Department of West Bengal. It has further been estimated that approximately 178,000 hectares are water areas. The discrepancy in the figures for forest cover possibly arises from the fact that some denote areas designated as forest land (i.e., including waterways and degraded forest) while others represent an assessment of the tree covered areas only [4-7]. The eastern sector of Indian Sundarbans falls mostly under the reserve forest. The growth of mangroves is very luxuriant in this forest as there is minimum anthropogenic pressure in this sector. However, the fringe villages with substantial population need timber, fuel wood, fodder grass, honey, wax, fishes, crabs etc for their livelihood. Hence, the villagers encroaches the reserve forest illegally to get these resources. This causes a negative pressure on the positive health of the mangrove ecosystem. In addition to this, stressors like natural disaster, siltation, pollution, sea level rise etc also cause a negative impact on the mangrove ecosystem. Considering this background, we conducted an opinion poll from respondents who are direct and indirect stakeholders related to Sundarban mangroves. Our basic aim was to address a series of critical questions to the respondents for capturing the major threats operating in the reserve forest area of Indian Sundarbans, and threre by pinpoint the most important threat Organic & Medicinal Chem IJ 2(4): OMCIJ.MS.ID.555595 (2017) 001 Organic and Medicinal Chemistry International Journal ISSN 2474-7610 Abstract Mangrove ecosystems are exposed to a variety of threats. These threats encompass stressors like deforestation, over exploitation of mangroves, pollution, sea level rise, siltation etc. In this paper, we have captured the major threats operating on the mangrove ecosystem of Indian Sundarbans, which is mostly under the reserve forest and lies adjacent to the western part of the Bangladesh Sundarbans. We selected five categories of respondents to evaluate and rank the major threats by the product of Threat Ranking (TR) and % of voting of the respondents to achieve the total Threat Score (TS) and finally the Combined Threat Scale (CTS) for each category of threat. Our analysis revealed highest CTS (Combined Threat Scale) value to erosion and lowest to pollution, which may be attributed to high wave actions and minimum anthropogenic pressure in the eastern Indian Mangrove forest adjacent to Bangladesh Sundarbans Abbreviations: Indian mangrove forest; respondents; Threat Score (TS); Combined Threat Scale (CTS).