Thaindian News

Washington, April 6 (IANS) Coastal mangrove forests across the Indo-Pacific region store more carbon than almost any other forest on earth.

A research team from the US Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest and Northern Research Stations, University of Helsinki and the Centre for International Forestry Research examined the carbon content of 25 mangrove forests across the Indo-Pacific region.

They found that per hectare these mangrove forests store up to four times more carbon than most other tropical forests around the world, reports the journal Nature Geoscience.

“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,” according to a US Forest Service statement.

“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, post-doctoral research ecologist at the Pacific Southwest Research Station in Hawaii.

The mangrove forest’s ability to store such large amounts of carbon can be attributed, in part, to the deep organic-rich soils in which it thrives.

Mangrove-sediment carbon stores were on average five times larger than those typically observed in temperate, boreal and tropical terrestrial forests, on a per-unit-area basis.

The mangrove forest’s complex root systems, which anchor the plants in underwater sediment, slow down incoming tidal waters allowing organic and inorganic material to settle in the sediment surface.

Low oxygen conditions slow decay rates, resulting in much of the carbon accumulating in the soil. In fact, mangroves have more carbon in their soil alone than most tropical forests have in all their biomass and soil combined.

This high-carbon storage suggests mangroves may play an important role in climate change management.

Recently, mangroves have experienced rapid deforestation worldwide - a 30 percent decline in the past 50 years.