New science and developments for the world's mangroves
These salt marsh trees perform an outsized service to biodiversity and climate change
News items and scientific papers on mangroves have caught my eye in the last few months.
First, what are mangroves?
Mangroves are trees, and just as there are different species of pines or oaks, there are different species of mangroves, around 70 of them. The term “mangrove” can refer to an individual tree or a forest of trees.
They grow in brackish waters of coastal lagoons, bays, deltas, and estuaries and are characterized by the ramifying arial roots that extend above the waterline. Mangroves like it where it is warm, the tropics and subtropics. The historic range of mangroves includes the East Indies and the northern shores of Australia. They grow along the coastal regions of Africa as well.
In the Western Hemisphere, their environments include the West Indies, Central America, and South America. In the United States, mangroves occur along the coasts of Florida and the Gulf states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
If you took all the mangroves and put them in one place, their collective area would be around 57,000 square miles, an area a little larger than the state of Louisiana. Although they constitute only five percent of the world’s forests, a lot of mammals, reptiles, and birds breed in mangroves. Each mangrove forest is usually dominated by one or two mangrove species; this led a lot of folks to conclude that mangrove forests were not biodiverse in other ways. But researchers found that they hold an immense number of insect species.
Mangroves in Florida
Just this week, in Broward County, in heavily populated southern Florida, The Broward County Commission nixed a proposal that would have allowed a property owner to build warehouses on and near a protected mangrove forest.
Building the warehouses would have required suspending local environmental laws that protect the mangroves east of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
