anthropocenemagazine.org
Mangroves are making a comeback. It's a rare climate success story.
There’s some good news growing along the coasts of countries around the world. Mangrove forests, the imperiled ecosystems championed for their ability to store carbon and protect land from storm-driven flooding, are bouncing back. These woodlands that thrive at the soggy boundary between land and sea suffered alarming declines through much of the 20th century, chopped down chiefly to make way for fish ponds, rice paddies and other kinds of agriculture. But in the last decade, mangroves have been gaining ground, erasing nearly all of the losses since 1980, according to research recently published in Science. “After decades of loss, we’re finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves,” said Zhen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University and lead author of the study. Zhang and colleagues used computer programs to comb through 40 years of satellite images from around the world. The distinctive way mangrove forests reflect light enabled them to train the computers to pick out this vegetation and track its ebb and flow over time. The analysis revealed that in much of the world, years of loss began changing course in recent decades. Between the 1980s and 2010, global mangrove forests shrank from around 155,000 square kilometers...
