Mangroves among the most carbon-rich forests in the tropics

EurekAlert: Coastal mangrove forests store more carbon than almost any other forest on Earth, according to a study conducted by a team of U.S. Forest Service and university scientists. Their findings are published online in the journal Nature Geoscience. (www.nature.com/naturegeoscience.com)

A research team from the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest and Northern research stations, University of Helsinki and the Center for International Forestry Research examined the carbon content of 25 mangrove forests across the Indo-Pacific region and found that per hectare mangrove forests store up to four times more carbon than most other tropical forests around the world.

"Mangroves have long been known as extremely productive ecosystems that cycle carbon quickly, but until now there had been no estimate of how much carbon resides in these systems. That's essential information because when land-use change occurs, much of that standing carbon stock can be released to the atmosphere," says Daniel Donato, a postdoctoral research ecologist at the Pacific Southwest Research Station in Hilo, Hawaii.

…This high-carbon storage suggests mangroves may play an important role in climate change management. Aside from the main greenhouse gas contributor of fossil-fuel burning, the forestry sector can play a part—especially carbon-rich forests that are being cleared rapidly on a global scale, such as mangroves….

Rhizophora mangle (red mangrove) forest, Caeté estuary, Bragança, Pará, Brazil, shot by Ulf Mehlig, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license