Scientists have determined for the first time that Amazon’s waterlogged coastal mangrove forests, which are being clear cut for cattle pastures and shrimp ponds, store significantly more carbon per acre than the region’s famous rainforest.
The long-term study, recently published in the journal Biology Letters, provides a better understanding of how mangrove deforestation contributes to the greenhouse gas effect, one of the leading causes of global warming, said J. Boone Kauffman, an ecologist at Oregon State University who led the research.
The Brazilian mangrove forest fringes the entirety of the Atlantic Coast at the mouth of the Amazon, the largest river in the world with the largest mangrove forest. Although preservation of the Amazon rainforest has been the subject of intense awareness efforts over the last few decades, less attention has been paid to the Amazon mangroves.
Mangroves represent 0.6 percent of all the world’s tropical forests but their deforestation accounts for as much as 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that come from all tropical deforestation.
“Over 25 years, we found two to three more times more carbon stored in the mangroves than in the rainforest,” said Kauffman, a senior research professor in OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences. “When those forests are cut down they lose carbon, creating far more greenhouse gases than when the rainforests are cleared. Mangroves deserve conservation and participation in climate change mitigation actions throughout the world.”
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Image via Oregon State University
