Marine biodiversity in Thailand: Trends in the mangrove ecosystem
1997
Ajcharaporn Piumsomboon | Nittharatana Paphavasit (Chulalongkorn Univ., Bangkok (Thailand). Faculty of Science. Dept. of Marine Science)
Biodiversity is not just only species composition of flora and fauna in particular places of interest but the diverse of both ecological roles and gene pools in the ecosystem. To understand biodiversity, one should have good information on both biology and ecology of the organisms. This paper aims to elucidate the status of marine biodiversity study in Thailand using the mangrove forests as the model of interest. Most of the research works in mangrove forests concerns with the mangal trees with extensive data on species composition, forest structure, growth and production. But there was little interest in the associated flora and fauna of the trees. Within the past two decades, there were increasing number of works dealing with other components of the mangrove forests included microorganisms, algae, plankton and planktonic larvae, benthos, fishes, migratory birds and vertebrates. However, most of the works concerning those organisms dealt with the species composition, distribution and abundance. For better understanding and maintaining of the rich biodiversity of mangrove forests, we still need to know more about life history, ecological roles, genetic diversity of organisms inhabited in the forests. The response and risk of those organisms exposed to environmental variability such as habitat destruction need to be assess in order to maintain the biodiversity of the mangrove ecosystem.
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