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Then, the USGS began to offer year and sustain more than 100 million in mangrove forests? Researchers
Landsat data free of charge. “And com- people, according to the 2014 United mapped mangroves and identified
puters reached the point where we can Nations Environment Programme which ones contain the most blue car-
now process large volumes of data,” (UNEP) report The Importance of bon: mangals in Sumatra, Borneo, and
says Giri. “That opens the way to Mangroves: A Call to Action. UNEP New Guinea, and along the coasts of
looking at mangroves from another director Achim Steiner believes that Colombia and northern Ecuador. The
perspective: space.” destroying mangroves “makes neither findings were published in 2013 in
Satellites offer images of Earth with ecological nor economic sense.” The the journal Conservation Letters. The
several degrees of resolution, says Giri, report estimates that the deforesta- results can help guide decisions about
similar to pixel sizes on a computer tion of the world’s mangroves results priority areas for mangrove conserva-
screen. Previously, scientists had visu- in annual economic damages of up to tion and rehabilitation, according to
alized global land cover in pixels equal $42 billion. lead project scientist Mark Spalding of
to about one square kilometer—not More critical is the loss of human The Nature Conservancy.
enough detail to identify mangroves. lives. A study by scientists affili- Mangroves contribute to mitigating
Giri’s technique used a finer resolu- ated with the International Union climate change by removing green-
tion: 30 square meters. “That made for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) house gases from the atmosphere. Like
it much easier to find mangroves in looked at the effects of the tsunami other plants, mangroves capture car-
small patches,” he says. that hit Asia in December 2004. The bon dioxide (CO2) from the atmo-
Once scientists know where man- researchers compared the wave’s sphere and store it in their leaves,
groves are, they can estimate their effects on two villages in south- roots, and trunks (biomass) and in
value as bulwarks against sea-level rise, ern Sri Lanka: Kapuhenwala and the soil. But unlike most other forests,
severe storms such as hurricanes, and Wanduruppa. In Kapuhenwala, sur- mangrove soils do not have a maxi-
tsunamis. rounded by 200 hectares of dense mum storage capacity. They continu-
As a next step in the research, mangroves, the tsunami killed two ously amass carbon in soil, where it
Giri and his colleagues are looking people. Wanduruppa, where mangrove can remain for millennia.
at mangroves through the eyes of forests are degraded, had more than Mangroves are extremely produc-
remote-sensing techniques such as 5000 fatalities. Mangroves can absorb tive ecosystems that can increase
light detection and ranging (LIDAR). 70 to 90 percent of the ocean’s wave their biomass relatively quickly, says
LIDAR illuminates a target with a energy, studies have found, helping Spalding, trapping far more carbon
laser and analyzes the reflected light to block the effects of the severe storms than other forest types can. The
make measurements. It may offer even and sea-level rise expected to increase upper meters of mangrove soils are
more precise estimates, Giri says, of with climate change. primarily anaerobic—missing the
the extent of mangrove forests. Mangroves are also one of the organisms that decompose organic
most carbon-rich ecosystems on the material and release carbon into the
Ecosystem services providers planet. How much “blue carbon”— environment.
Mangroves provide ecosystem services carbon captured by the world’s coastal When mangrove forests are cut
worth up to $57,000 per hectare per and ocean ecosystems—is stored down for timber or converted to
freshwater crustaceans in northeast- Although this conveyor belt’s status crustacean, and human. In Trinidad
ern South America’s wetlands. The is uncertain, if it continues, it could and beyond, that is life in a tangled
birds spend their summer breeding cause problems for plants beyond mangal.
seasons there and then winter in mangroves, as well as for the wildlife
Trinidad. The South American wet- and human populations that eat fish,
lands and their aquatic inhabitants are crustaceans, and mollusks caught near Cheryl Lyn Dybas (cheryl.lyn.dybas@gmail.
contaminated with mercury from the the affected mangals. com), a fellow of the International League of
Conservation Writers, is an ecologist and science
region’s gold mines. When the ibises From human to freshwater crusta- journalist who regularly writes for BioScience
migrate back to Trinidad, mercury cean to ibis to mangrove. And—full and many other publications on conservation
goes with them. circle—from mangrove back to ibis, biology and ecosystem health.