Application of Health Assessment Index for assessing the ecological health of River Mahanadi
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Authors
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Sanjay Bhowmick
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Sajina A M
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Srikanta Samanta
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Samir Kumar Paul
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Deepa Sudheesan
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Subir Kumar Nag
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Vikash Kumar
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Raju Baitha
Abstract
Biotic communities are sensitive to environmental factors and offer an integral perspective of the environmental conditions of a given habitat. Fishare widely used as sentinel species to assess environmental health and are excellent indicators of overall health of rivers. A study was carried out to
evaluate and compare the environmental quality of different stretches of River Mahanadi by analyzing fish health using Health Assessment Index (HAI). The HAI values of individual fishes varied from 0 to 200. The fish which got the highest score for HAI was from the winter sample of Sonepur. The lowest score for HAI was recorded at Tikarpara, a site which falls under protected Satkosia river sanctuary. The most common groups of parasites recorded were myxozoans, trichodinids, copepods and monogenetic trematodes. Parasite
numbers recorded from Cirrhinus reba supported the HAI hypothesis that higher endoparasite and lower ectoparasite numbers occur at highly impacted areas.
The present study suggests that HAI can be used as an effective biological monitoring tool for Indian rivers.
Key words Ecological health, Biomonitoring, Parasite
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