Approved by Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics (CARE) of University Grants Commission, India

INSTRUCTION FOR AUTHORS
The Journal publishes original research papers and short communications relevant to freshwater, brackishwater and marine environments.

Research papers should report the results of original research. The material should not have been previously published elsewhere.

Short Communication is a concise but complete description of a limited investigation, which will not be included in a later paper. Short Communications should be as completely documented, both by reference to the literature and description of the experimental procedures employed, as a regular paper. They should not be longer than 6 printed pages including figures, tables and references.

The journal will be in open access platform and resort to green publishing, without any submission through hard copies.

Submission checklist
Verify this checklist to carry out a final check of your submission before you send it to the journal for review.

1. Cover letter from the corresponding author, with the full address, email and phone number of all the authors, with a statement that the manuscript is based on original research and has not been submitted to other journals or sources for publication. The authors should also state that the work described has not been published previously that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere, including electronically, in the same form, in English or in any other language, without the written consent of the journal.

One author has been designated as the corresponding author with contact details:

• E-mail address
• Full postal address
• In cases reseach scholars or students are involved in the paper, the corresponding author may preferably be the supervising teacher/senior author.

Upload the following documents along with submission through email (jabf@keralauniversity.ac.in)

1. Manuscript as a single file in MS WORD with all tables and figures placed in appropriate places. Please ensure the figures and the tables included in the single file are placed next to the relevant text in the manuscript, rather than at the bottom or the top of the file. The corresponding caption should be placed directly below the figure and above the table. Once the paper is accepted, original figures of high resolution should be submitted.
2. Declaration of competing interest (Options: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper or if they have any competing interest it should be specified. The corresponding author should also declare that the he/she has obtained permission from all the authors for submission of the manuscript.
3. Referees: The journal welcome submissions by the authors of the names and addresses of three to five individuals (with their e-mails) who could expertly review the paper, and who are not from the same institutions as the authors. The Editors reserve the right to use these or other reviewers. All the reviewers should be experts (with recent publications in the field) in the specific area of the research depicted in the manuscript.

Human and Animal Rights
If the work involves the use of human subjects, the author should ensure that the work described has been carried out in accordance with the clearance of the institutional human ethics committee and the permission order should be submitted along with the manuscript. In the case of experiments involving animals referred to in the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act 1960, or similar legislations prevailing in other countries, the details regarding permission/sanction order from the Institutional Animal Ethics Committee (IAEC) established under The Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA) or similar bodies in other countries may be referred in the manuscript.

Further considerations
• Manuscript has been 'spell checked' and 'grammar checked'
• All references mentioned in the Reference List are cited in the text, and vice versa
• Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet)

Format of the research paper
Title: The title should be concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid abbreviations and formulae where possible.
Author names: Use last name(s) of authors with initials. The authors' affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a superscript Arabic numeral immediately after the author's name and immediately before the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name and the e-mail address of all the authors.
Clearly indicate the name of the corresponding author with an Asterix, with ORCID ID, if any.
Abstract: Present the abstract of the paper immediately after title page on a separate page. The abstract should state concisely and unambiguously the objective(s) of the research, the salient results and major conclusions. Do not include references, tables and figure numbers, statistical notation indicating significance level or confidence limits and derived statistics in the abstract. An abstract is often presented separately from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. Maximum words permitted is 300.
Keywords: Immediately after the abstract, provide a maximum of 6 keywords. Use British spelling and avoid general and plural terms and multiple concepts (avoid, for example, 'and', 'of'). Do not use words/terms in the title of the paper as keywords.
Introduction: State the objectives of the work and provide an adequate background, avoiding detailed literature survey or a summary of the results. Use recent references as far as possible and avoid quoting predatory journals.
Material and methods: Provide sufficient details to allow the work to be reproduced. Methods already published should be indicated by a reference; only relevant modifications should be described.
Results and Discussion: Results should be clear and concise, with tables and figures. Avoid presenting the same data in tables and figures. All graphs, line drawings and computerised graphics can be given in colour, with appropriate labels. All the axis should be labelled and units should be clearly marked. Photographs/photomicrographs must be with a minimum 300 dpi resolution. If multiple photos are represented under the same figure number, it should be provided as plates with subunits labelled as A, B, C, D etc.
Discussion should explore the significance of the results of the work, not repeat them. Avoid extensive citations and discussion of published literature. The main conclusions of the study may be presented as a short paragraph towards the end of this section.
Acknowledgements: Should be concise and limited to those who supported the work directly. The funding agencies should be specifically mentioned in full and the permission letters, if any, should be given as order/permission numbers.
Foot notes should be avoided in the article.

Reference style
Citations may be made directly (or parenthetically). Groups of references should be listed first alphabetically, then chronologically.
Examples: 'as demonstrated (Nair, 1999, 2000a, b; Nair and Thampy, 1999). Wafar et al. (2010) have recently shown ....'
References must be listed alphabetically by first author and then chronologically at the end of the paper, in the following format:
Journal article
Macpherson, E., Chan, T.Y., Kumar, A.B. & Rodríguez-Flores, P.C. 2020. On some squat lobsters from India (Decapoda, Anomura, Munididae), with description of a new species of Paramunida Baba, 1988. ZooKeys, 965: 17–36; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.965.55213. (Journal names should be full and DOI numbers should be provided, wherever available).
Book
Nelson, J.S. 2006. Fishes of the World. 4th ed. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, 601 pp.
Book chapter
Kohn, A.J. and Amalsi, K.N. 1993. Comparative ecology of a biogeographically heterogeneous Conus assemblage. In: Wells, F.E., Walker, D.I., Kirkman, H., Lethbridge, R. (eds.), The Marine Flora and Fauna of Rottnest Island, Western Australia. Western Australian Museum, Perth, Australia, pp. 523–538.
Online reference
Huelsenbeck, J.P. and Ronquist, F. 2001. MrBayes 2.01: Bayesian inference of phylogeny. Available online at http://morphbank.ebc.uu.se/mrbayes/. [Accessed on 1 March 2019]
Dissertations resulting from graduate studies and non-serial proceedings of conferences/symposia are to be treated as books and cited as such. Papers not cited must not be listed in the references.

Formatting requirements
All manuscripts must have 1.5-line spacing, and must contain both page numbers and consecutive line numbering. Articles must be divided into clearly numbered sections. The submission should be in MS WORD and the text should be in single column. Use Times New Roman, with font size 12. Aside from this, there are no strict formatting requirements, but all manuscripts must contain the essential elements needed to convey the details of the study, including Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, and References. The Figures/Tables with Captions should be placed in appropriate places within the text. The submission of MS should be as a single file.
Divide your article into clearly defined and numbered sections. Subsections should be numbered 1.1 (then 1.1.1, 1.1.2, ...), 1.2, etc. (the abstract is not included in section numbering). Use this numbering also for internal cross-referencing: do not just refer to 'the text'. Any subsection may be given a brief heading. Each heading should appear on its own separate line.

Peer review
This journal operates a single anonymized review process. All contributions will be initially assessed by the editor for suitability for the journal, and plagiarism, if any. Papers deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the scientific quality of the paper. The Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles. The Editor's decision is final. Editors are not involved in decisions about papers which they have written themselves or have been written by members of the department or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest. Any such submission is subject to all of the journal's usual procedures, with peer review handled independently of the relevant editor and their research groups.

Submission after revision
The corresponding author must provide us with an editable file of the entire corrected article in MS WORD. The final high resolution JPEG images of the figures should be provide along with the revised manuscript. The authors should provide a point-to-point reply to the reviewers comments and the comments recorded as track edited file. The revised submission without reply to the reviewers will be rejected.
To avoid unnecessary errors you are strongly advised to use the 'spell-check' and 'grammar-check' functions of your word processor.

Galley Proof: A galley proof will be sent to the corresponding before publication.

Page charges
There is no page charges or processing fee for the journal.

Offprints
The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail.

Author enquiries
All author enquiries should be through email only and no telephonic call will be entertained. The minimum time requirement for review is three months since submission of the manuscript.

Special issues
Any request for publication of special issues should be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief. The cost for printing and layout of the special issue should be met by the event organisers in advance and papers will undergo normal peer-review process of the journal.

How to submit the manuscript: The MS with ALL required files in checklist should be sent as email attachment to: jabf@keralauniversity.ac.in

For the instruction to authors in pdf version, please click here.