A CASE STUDY IN KOVALAM COASTAL VILLAGE TO IDENTIFY MICROPLASTICS USING FTIR AND MANGROVES BY NDVI ANALYSIS

Kovalam Beach, which is also known as Covelong, is a famous beach, among the most pristine in India. Extremely popular among people due to shallow waters and low tidal waves. It is also one of the oldest tourist enclaves in India, which was known among tourist circuits right in the 1930s. It is a fishing village that stretches along the Coromandel Coast, located in the Latitude: 12°46'32.03"N Longitude: 80°15'0.02"E. It is popular for water sports, particularly swimming and windsurfing. Besides, there is a backwater that is endowed with fringing mangroves and their living resources. Human population explosion exhaust all natural resources and polluting everywhere without environmental concern. Around the Kovalam backwater area number of building rush establishing and polluting the environment very badly. All are fascinated with using plastics in various forms of packed items and for carrying goods. Plastics are non-biodegradable, synthetic material distributed widely and cause environmental degradation along with microplastics playing a major role. Now a days plastics and microplastics pollution need urgent attention to reduce its impact everywhere like land, marshy land, river, coast, and ocean. In the study area along the Kovalam backwater, the fringing mangroves are growing, which will get destroyed due to increasing plastics pollution through plastics and microplastics that arrest in their roots and reduce its respiration and remaining plastics reaches the ocean by river flow and tidal action causing ocean pollution and organism health gets impacted.