India is the seventh largest nation in the world sharing ten biogeographical regions along with four seasons in a year. As a result, India bears vast diversity of algae which can be fruitfully utilized for the welfare of human beings as a promising tool for biofuel production, biomonitoring tool for assessing the ecological health of waterbodies and as a source of various bioproducts of algal origin having commercial importance. In the light of these facts, it seems that, there is an urgent need to carry out qualitative and quantitative estimations of algal diversity in India and their documentation in the form of image database as successfully done by the western countries. In the same context, it deserves to mention that varying biogeographical and environmental conditions significantly affecting the physiological and metabolic pathways of algae which resulted in different morphological forms (same genotype). This globally observed phenomenon in nature is generally termed as “Phenotypic plasticity”. These morphological variants or phenodemes or morphotypes in algae make the ecotoxicological assessments ambiguous on taxonomic ground which may leads to erroneous findings. In this regard web-based image database on algae was found as an effective tool to conserve the taxonomical information about algae and to cope up with the problem of morphological variants.
Various image databases on algae are available on web for e.g., ANSP algal image database, Diatom of the United States (America), Algaebase (Ireland), Algaevision (United Kingdom) and The CAUP image database (Czech Republic) etc, which are very helpful in identifying algae, solving the confusing aspects of algal taxonomy and connecting phycologists from all around the world at a common platform. Web-based databases play a very important role in disseminating the information regarding recent changes in the algal taxonomy. For example, through ANSP algal image database we came to know that drastic taxonomical changes were taken place at genus and species level in the three classes of algae i.e., Bacillariophyceae (diatoms), Chlorophyceae (Green algae) and Cyanophyceae (Blue-green algae) between years 2007-2011. Inspired from above listed databases present database, Algal image database of India was developed. Unique key features which make this database advance over the others are: (a) all the important available databases on algae are from temperate region (colder countries), not a single database are from tropical or sub-tropical region (hotter countries), (b) several of times the measurements of morphological features (morphological variations) such as length, width, height, biovolume and striae patterns (in diatoms) of an investigated algal species was unable to match with the information available on the daily used databases, (c) deals with taxonomical characterization of algae on the basis of their origin and mode of preservation which makes comparisons between taxonomic websites easier,(d) algae identification were made on the basis of key, morphology and dimensions.