Biographical note

C. Max Finlayson is an internationally renowned wetland ecologist with extensive experience internationally in water pollution, agricultural impacts, invasive species, climate change, and human well-being and wetlands. He has participated in global assessments such as those conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate  Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the Global Environment Outlook 4 & 5 (UNEP). Since the early 1990s, he has been a technical adviser to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and has written extensively on wetland ecology and management. He has also been actively involved in environmental NGOs and from 2002 to 2007 was president of the governing council of global NGO Wetlands International. He has contributed to over 450 journal articles, reports, guidelines, proceedings, and book chapters on wetland ecology and  management and to the development of concepts and methods for wetland inventory, assessment, and  monitoring and undertaken many site-based assessments in many countries. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Marine and Freshwater Research published by CSIRO Publishing and of the book series Wetland, Ecology, Conservation and Management published by Springer. 

Gurdeep Rastogi is working as a Senior Scientist at the Wetland Research and Training Centre (WRTC) of the Chilika Development Authority (CDA). He has received his PhD in the area of Environmental Microbiology from the National Centre for Cell Sciences, Pune, in the year 2006. He has completed his postdoctoral research at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology and the University of California, Davis, USA. He is currently heading the molecular ecological research at WRTC, a nodal lab of CDA which has been entrusted with the responsibility of managing the Chilika Lake by the Odisha State Government. His research area is focussed on understanding the microbial biogeography andfunctions in coastal systems with special emphasis on bacteria, archaea, and phytoplankton. Over the past 15 years, he has published more than 40 papers in peer-reviewed international journals which have been well cited by the scientific communities, worldwide. He is an active reviewer for many international journal published by Springer and Elsevier.

Deepak R. Mishra is a Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia, Athens. His research interests are mainly in the area of remote sensing and satellite image processing as applied to inland and coastal environments. His specific interests are water quality, wetlands biophysical characteristics including gross primary productivity, carbon sequestration potential, application of big data in environmental informatics, and cyber-physical systems research. He completed his PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He has published numerous papers in various high-impact international journals and book chapters, presented his research in many national and international meetings, edited special issues and books, and received external grants from various federal agencies. He currently serves on the editorial board of GIScience & Remote Sensing. He is an associate editor of the ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and a senior associate editor of Remote Sensing and coeditor of Southeastern Geographer.

 Ajit K. Pattnaik as the former chief executive of Chilika Development Authority, headed the most successful project of restoration and sustainable management of Chilika Lake for 16 years. He completed his PhD in the “Characterization of Phytodiversity of Chilika Lake” from Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. Chilika was removed from the Montreux Record in 2002, due to the successful ecological restoration. He has 37 years of varied professional experience in the management and restoration of coastal ecosystems, climate change, and disaster management. He has extensive experience in project formulation, planning, management, wetland restoration, ecotourism, and water and community development projects. Presently, he is a consultant to the World Bank and UNDP and holds the position of the vice president of Wetlands International South Asia. He is a member of several international and national scientific and technical committees and has published over 100 scientific articles. He is also member of the expert advisory panel of journal Lakes & Reservoirs: Science, Policy and Management for Sustainable Use published by Wiley.