With the aim of educating people on the uniqueness of mangroves, retired scientist couple, Dr. Sayeeda and Dr Mohideen Wafar has recently published ‘101 Questions on Mangroves towards Awareness’
RUVINA KHAN | NT NETWORK
When people think of mangroves, most know these as only a bunch of trees that grow in water. “Even those people who are tasked to protect them know only a little beyond them as trees,” says Dr. Sayeeda Wafar, a retired scientist who previously worked with the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO).
Thus, with the aim of educating people about the beauty and importance of mangroves, she, along with her husband
Dr. Mohideen Wafar, also a retired NIO scientist, recently came out with their book ‘101 Questions on Mangroves towards Awareness’.
“Mangroves are unique in that they develop an ecosystem of their own, sustain a food chain different from that in other parts of the sea, and have various environmental roles, the most important one among them being shoreline protection,” says Dr.Sayeeda.
In fact, Dr.Sayeeda’s work at NIO mainly focused on the ecology of mangroves. Recognising the importance of restoration of mangroves as a means of safeguarding them from human-induced damages, in 1990, she began to develop simple techniques of mangrove afforestation – collection of seedlings, design of nurseries, selection of suitable sites for planting them, monitoring their survival and dissemination of the success stories. In this process, she trained a number of womenfolk in Goa, Karnataka, and Maharashtra in mangrove afforestation techniques.
After her retirement in 2004, she took up the task of awareness creation of the value of mangroves to coastal communities. This led her to give series of talks to people in various walks of life and school children. The new book is a continuation of her efforts to create further awareness.
“As you know, you can protect anything only if you know its value. It is with this idea in mind that we wrote this book,” she says.
The book is arranged in a question-answer dialogue style so that continuity is maintained. It begins with what are mangroves, and goes on to highlight the various types, where they occur, what determines their presence and abundance, in what ways are they useful and how we can plan for their conservation and protect them against unsustainable activities like overharvest and land conversion. The book ends by focusing on how to retrieve the lost mangrove areas and offset the damages. This book, they say, is useful to students, environmental wardens, conservationists, teachers of environmental sciences, and even tourists.
“There are several ways to approach the issue of mangroves – like compiling scientific papers, reproducing statutory guidelines of the government and so on. But such approaches hold little interest for the uninitiated. That is why we thought we should have the entire approach bereft of scientific and legal jargon and have it formatted as though we are teaching a child of seven to eight years of age. This worked well with our earlier book on coral reefs and that led us to adopt the same strategy here,” says Dr. Sayeeda. Going forward, the couple is now working on two more books – one on the deep sea environment and another on blue economy.
