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During the 1970s, mangroves occupied as much as 200,000 km 2, encompassing approximately 75% of the world's coastlines. [24] Now, global mangrove area has experienced significant decline where at least 35% has been lost. Mangroves are continuing to diminish at a rate of 1-2% per year. [24]
The Philippines, with the fifth longest coastline in the world, holds at least 50% of known mangrove species and is considered one of the top 15 most mangrove-rich countries. Philippine mangrove forests cover an estimated 2,473.62 km 2 (955.07 sq mi) of coastline as of 2003, which comprise 3% of the total forest cover remaining in the country.
Their loss would be ‘disastrous’, conservationists warned as a global assessment on how mangroves are faring was published. Half the world’s mangroves ‘at risk of collapse’ as climate ...
Why mangroves can be good: They could help protect against sea level rise because their stick-like roots help build up the soil height and their falling leaves decompose into soil.
This decline has led to a negative chain of effects in other ecosystems that are dependent on mangrove forest for survival. [15] In just the last decade, at least 35 percent of the world's mangroves have been destroyed, exceeding the rate of the disappearance of tropical rainforests. [ 16 ]
Mangrove environments in the Eastern Hemisphere harbor six times as many species of trees and shrubs as do mangroves in the New World. Genetic divergence of mangrove lineages from terrestrial relatives, in combination with fossil evidence, suggests mangrove diversity is limited by evolutionary transition into the stressful marine environment ...
Mangrove plants require a number of physiological adaptations to overcome the problems of low environmental oxygen levels, high salinity, and frequent tidal flooding.Each species has its own solutions to these problems; this may be the primary reason why, on some shorelines, mangrove tree species show distinct zonation.
Blue carbon is defined by the IPCC as "Biologically driven carbon fluxes and storage in marine systems that are amenable to management." [2]: 2220 Another definition states: "Blue carbon refers to organic carbon that is captured and stored by the oceans and coastal ecosystems, particularly by vegetated coastal ecosystems: seagrass meadows, tidal marshes, and mangrove forests."