Comparison of the performance of two indices of trophic status for depicting the status of Pulicat lagoon ecosystem.

In the recent years, several indices of trophic status of coastal ecosytems are being used worldwide. However, not all of them can be applied successfully to depict the true trophic status of shallow coastal ecosystems due to their inherent complexities in nutrient circulation and interactions between biotic organisms. The most widely used index is Carlson's Trophic State Index (TSI), while more recently, several environmental indices have been constructed using soft computing techniques such as fuzzy logic. In the present investigation, a comparison of the performances of a conventional trophic state index and a newly developed fuzzy-based trophic state index has been presented in detail. The aim of the work was to highlight the advantages of the newer technique over the existing techniques in light of the inherent variability of both data as well as the sampling procedures undertaken for studying a coastal lagoon ecosystem called Pulicat lagoon in the southeast coast of India. The results of the study have shown that while there are discrepancies in depicting the trophic status of the lagoon using Carlson's index, the newer logic-based index predicted the trophic status accurately which was verified by field assessments. Thus the successful application of a more reliable index to estimate trophic status has been presented.