Environmental influences on the cyanobacterial mat formation in the mangrove ecosystems along the southwest coast of India

Abstract

Cyanobacteria are Gram-negative, oxygen-evolving photoautotrophic bacteria found in almost every conceivable habitat around the world. Cyanobacteria are extremophiles identified from geothermal springs to cold deserts (Amarouche-Yala et al., 2014;Mataloni & Komárek, 2004) and existed for about 2.8 billion years on earth (Olson, 2006). As the oldest oxygen-evolving photosynthetic microorganisms on earth, cyanobacteria significantly influenced ambient atmospheric and biosphere status (Demoulin et al., 2019;Paerl & Huisman, 2009). Planktic species have been the subject of numerous investigations in terms of risk assessment; however, little is known about benthic cyanobacterial forms (Gaget et al., 2017). Although reports on the prevalence of benthic cyanobacteria have increased