Bidong Island is a small island located in the South China Sea, and is about 14 km from mainland Peninsular Malaysia. The island and the Bidong archipelago boast of its richness in diversity of both terrestrial and marine organisms and its undeniably pristine and thriving ecosystem. In 1975-1990, Bidong Island was formerly a UNHCR refugee camp for a quarter of a million Vietnamese "Boat people" escaping the Vietnam War, and still holds great significance to many of its descendants. Due to its historical significance, the Terengganu State government plans to develop Bidong Island as a heritage tourism site and a new scuba diving destination. This book highlights the uniqueness of Bidong Island and its archipelago, paying particular attention to the biological aspect (which includes marine and terrestrial organisms) and the pollution status surrounding the island. These mainly focus on organisms of the open water and benthic ecosystems such as plankton, fishes, corals reef communities, crustaceans and foraminifera. In addition, we discuss terrene related topics, which includes tree diversity, lichens and also herpetofauna surrounding the Bidong Island. Indisputably an important topic, we also address the pollution status surrounding Bidong Island, with emphasis on heavy metals and its impact. Readers interested in the areas of environmental sciences should find this book appealing. This book can also be used by students and researchers when discussing about tropical environments on island ecosystems. We do hope that stakeholders that would partake in future interest of Bidong Island (particularly in tourism) are equally aware of the current health status of the island and would engage in conserving and sustaining the diversity and heritage of the archipelago for the benefit of the community.

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Ong Meng Chuan is an Associate Professor in Marine Science at Faculty of Science and Marine Environment, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. He holds a doctoral degree in Marine Pollution specifically in Metals Pollution from University of South Brittany, France. His research focus on the metallic elements content in sediment samples which can act as geo-marker for pollution studies. He also studied the sediment characteristic and the relationship between particle size and the metallic elements concentration. Apart from the sediment samples, his research also includes on biota samples of fishes, crustaceans, bivalves, mollusks and plants such as seaweed and sea grass. From this biota samples, the suitability of using these organisms as bio-indicator can be identified which best reflect the environmental quality. Risk assessment towards human health by consuming these organisms can be estimated. Until now, he had participated in numbers of international conference and local conference in Malaysia to present his findings. He also actively published his finding in local Malaysia and international journal. He had been published 60 journals and attended more than 20 conferences and reviewer for numbers of journals. Currently, together with the researchers in Ocean Pollution and Ecotoxicology (OPEC) Research Interest Group and other researchers from other universities and organization, the group are actively gather all data from Malaysian marine aquatic environment to be stored in GIS database. With this database, these data can easily bereferred by other researchers for their studies. Melissa Beata Martin is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Coordinator of the Marine Biology Programme of the Faculty of Science and Marine Environment, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT). She received her Diploma in Fisheries and Bachelor of Science (Marine Biology) at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu and her PhD in Fisheries Science from University of Tasmania, Australia. Though specialising in taxonomy, phylogeny and systematics (with emphasis on parasitic isopods of the family Cymothoidae), she has expanded her interest in elucidating the diversity of crustaceans in Malaysian waters, parasites of aquatic organisms and symbiotic associates of marine organisms. Some of her current research is looking into co-invasive parasites of Peacock bass and native fish species in Terengganu waters, diversity of isopods, crustacean decapods and benthic crustaceans in Peninsular Malaysia, and even resolving the taxonomy of freshwater minnows in South Africa (one of her many collaborative initiatives). She has published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, which includes Zootaxa, Zookeys, Records of the Australian Museum, Crustaceana, Aquaculture, Thalassas and Data in Brief. She is also a recipient of the Tasmania Graduate Research Scholarship, Australian Museum Geddes Postgraduate Award and UMT's Academic Service Award. Due to her first love of taxonomy, some of her many research networks includes Australia Museum, Sydney; Museum of Tropical Queensland; Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart and South African Institute of Aquatic Biodiversity. In addition to her research responsibilities, she teaches undergraduate courses, which includes biological classification of marine organisms, marine invertebrate biology, marine biology field sampling course, biological oceanography and marine ecology. Mohd Yusoff Nurulnadia is a lecturer at the Faculty of Science and Marine Environment, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu. She received her PhD in Aquatic Toxicology from the Kagoshima University, Japan; MSc from the International Islamic University Malaysia; BSc from the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Malaysia. Her research discipline is in applied toxicology specifically on fish. Specialising in toxicology, she actively pursuing research that applying toxicity testing using fish embryos, juvenile fish