Mangroves- "The coastal lifeguards"

 🔱Mangroves 🔱

(image source - wildlife zones)

🔶"The lifeguards of coastal Areas"🔶

📌Mangrove forests, also called mangrove swamps, mangrove thickets or mangles, are productive wetlands that occur in coastal intertidal zones. Mangrove forests grow mainly at tropical and subtropical latitudes because mangroves cannot withstand freezing temperatures.

📍how much geographical area it covers?

✅The mangrove cover in India is 3,975 square kilometers. That means it covers around 0.15% of India's total geographical area.

🔵BENEFITS 👉

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.

🔴THREAT to mangrooves⏭️

In the past 100 years, mangrove forests have been cleared at an alarming rate. Tampa Bay has lost nearly 50 percent of its mangroves, while farther south, the mangroves of Charlotte Harbor estuary have declined by nearly 60 percent. But it’s not a lost cause. 

✔By addressing four key threats to both manatees and mangroves, they can thrive for generations to come.

  ☑Unsustainable Coastal Development and Infrastructure

  ☑Poor Farm and Water Management Upstream

  ☑Irresponsible Fishing and Aquaculture

  ☑Climate Change

🚩important step to deal with this situation

↪Mangrove Action Project (MAP) utilises a bottom-up tactic to mangrove conservation and restoration through the implementation of their ‘Community-Based Ecological Mangrove Restoration (CBEMR) technique. Through this holistic approach, their ✴aims are to empower local stakeholders and communities, ✴teaching them how to use mangrove ecology and biology to facilitate the natural regeneration of the forest.