Ecological and economic significance of swamp vegetation nursery for successful reforestation program: an insight from Bangladesh

ABSTRACTThere is a growing interest in understanding and establishing forest nurseries in swamp ecosystem areas of Bangladesh. This study aims to evaluate the socio-economic and ecological contribution of swamp small-scale tree nurseries. The result revealed that government and non-government organizations established swamp nurseries in Bangladesh. Swamp nursery producer generates an annual average net profit of USD 4745. Small-scale swamp nursery owners benefited in multiple forms: subsistence, house construction, savings purposes, and, most importantly, expansion of their businesses. However, the ecological aspect of seedling production was not satisfactory because of the lack of facilities such as skilled labor supply, access to high-quality germplasm, technical skills, nursery facilities, etc. In the nurseries observed, only two dominant swamp tree species, locally known as Hijol (Barringtonia acutangular) and Koroch (Pongamia pinnata) seedlings were found. In most cases, those seedlings were morphologically unhealthy, and the root structure was deformed, which was identified as a major problem of reforestation programs in wetland areas. Therefore, to make the reforestation program successful and create livelihoods for the rural poor in the wetland areas, there is an urgent need to develop quality seedlings-based swamp nurseries, which are only possible through proper nursery management techniques

Integrated transcriptome catalog of Tenualosa ilisha as a resource for gene discovery and expression profiling

Abstract The silver pride of Bangladesh, migratory shad, Tenualosa ilisha (Hilsa), makes the highest contribution to the total fish production of Bangladesh. Despite its noteworthy contribution, a well-annotated transcriptome data is not available. Here we report a transcriptomic catalog of Hilsa, constructed by assembling RNA-Seq reads from different tissues of the fish including brain, gill, kidney, liver, and muscle. Hilsa fish were collected from different aquatic habitats (fresh, brackish, and sea water) and the sequencing was performed in the next generation sequencing (NGS) platform. De novo assembly of the sequences obtained from 46 cDNA libraries revealed 462,085 transcript isoforms that were subsequently annotated using the Universal Protein Resource Knowledgebase (UniPortKB) as a reference. Starting from the sampling to final annotation, all the steps along with the workflow are reported here. This study will provide a significant resource for ongoing and future research on Hilsa for transcriptome based expression profiling and identification of candidate genes