A Novel Index for Identifying Priority Species: An Illustration Through Plankton Data of the Bay of Bengal

Prioritization of species at an ecoregion depending upon its ecological importance is a fundamental tool for making conservation policies under the bio-monitoring scheme. A general approach to species conservation includes prioritization of threatened or endangered species in a location. Here, we believe that prioritization and protection of the dominating species (have a high impact on system sustainability maintenance) of a habitat are also crucial aspects of habitat conservation research. Conventionally, the method of priority species identification for habitat is solely based on abundance data. Information on species abundance only prioritizes the species with high population density, which ignores several vital species that appear seasonally with lesser frequency. Therefore, only abundance data fails to capture actual species interactive as well as system dynamics where species abundance varies evidently with seasonal fluctuations. The season-specific species population must have the fitness of repeated appearance at a particular location with a time interval. Henceforth, in this present study, we propose a modified measure of abundance that can capture the dynamics of both dominating and migratory or weather-specific species fitness functions. Performance of the proposed method is analyzed through primary field data on plankton abundance from Digha, West Bengal–Talsari, Odisha region, Bay of Bengal. This modified metric has global application in identifying the top priority fitted species for any ecoregion from terrestrial to aquatic environments.