Importance of mangroves
Mangroves are important to people because they help stabilize Florida’s coastline ecosystem and reduce erosion.
Mangroves provide natural infrastructure to help protect nearby populated areas by reducing erosion and absorbing storm surge impacts during extreme weather events such as hurricanes.
They are also important to the ecosystem too.
Their dense roots help bind and build soils.
Their above-ground roots slow down water flows and encourage sediment deposits that reduce coastal erosion.
The complex mangrove root systems filter nitrates, phosphates and other pollutants from the water, improving the water quality flowing from rivers and streams into the estuarine and ocean environment.
Mangrove forests capture massive amounts of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and then trap and store them in their carbon-rich flooded soils for millennia.
This is an important ecosystem service as we face climate change.
This buried carbon is known as “blue carbon” because it is stored underwater in coastal ecosystems like mangrove forests, seagrass beds and salt marshes. (stores an estimated 11 billion tons of carbon)
What is the threat to mangroves
Half of the world's mangrove ecosystems are at risk of collapse as a result of human activity, rising sea levels and extreme weather, according to the latest survey by an international conservation group.
Unless action is taken, a quarter of the world's total mangrove areas could be completely submerged within 50 years, with critically endangered ecosystems in India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives expected to bear the brunt, said the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in an assessment published
Singapore, which lost almost all of its coastal mangrove habitats as a result of extensive land reclamation, is currently planning a restoration programme that will help defend its low-lying coastline against rising sea levels.
Switzerland-based IUCN assembled more than 250 experts to conduct the survey, and found that climate change was already affecting the spatial distribution of mangrove forests.
Damaging ecosystem changes were also being driven by the widespread diversion of freshwater for irrigation purposes
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