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>>Feller: This is the Mangrove and Macrobenthos Meeting.
This is a recurring conference of mangrove scientists--ahh--it recurs at approximately
four-year intervals.
The first one was in Kenya.
The second one was in Australia.
The mangrove-MMM3 was in Sri Lanka, and now the Fourth International Mangrove and Macrobenthos,
MMM4, is in St. Augustine, Florida.
>>Lewis: Well, mangroves are a very important coastal habitat.
They're relatively small in coverage but relatively powerful in terms of protecting humans from
tsunami waves, and from hurricanes, and typhoons.
And they are also very important for the ecology of coastal waters.
And they produce..they are the home for and produce shrimp, and fish, and crabs that are
important for local consumption.
So we have local fisher folk, as we call them, that depend on these food resources.
And then on a commercial basis, countries harvest and export much of this seafood in places
like Thailand and Indonesia.
It's a major part of the economy.
And you know we estimate that we've lost about half of all the mangroves that ever existed
and we're still losing mangroves.
And so you're affecting food sources for local coastal fisher folk, and you're affecting
the economy in many countries.
>>Feller: We have almost three hundred participants representing thirty-two countries.
So it's very exciting.
>>Krauss: So I served in the capacity of basically trying to organize the scientific program
and trying to coordinate the reviews of the different abstracts.
We had a total of two-hundred and four submissions for eighty-four oral presentation slots.
So it was a very difficult task.
But it tells you how important mangrove science is becoming--ahh--currently and how many people
really wanted to participate and show their research to this large audience.
>>Hester: Yes..so this MMM4 meeting really excited those of us at the institute because one of our main
goals is to bring together scientists from a variety of areas, a variety of locations,
to collaborate, to discuss issues and come up with novel solutions on how those might
be addressed.
>>Lovelock: In the plenary, I really wanted to talk about how vulnerable mangrove forests
are to sea-level rise.
And the take-home message is that some forests are really vulnerable.
And they're vulnerable for a range of reasons.
And one of them is if they have reduced sediment supply.
They occupy sites where there's very low tidal range, and if they're being squeezed..by..and
there's no place for them to go with rising sea level.
And they are very vulnerable.
>>Rajkaran: So our work initially started off looking at the utilization of mangroves and
the impact of harvesting on population structure and the longevity of our mangrove forests.
And now we've expanded into looking into mangrove expansion.
So, our research is very important for the region because it looks at how mangroves will
change over time and the impacts of climate change on mangroves.
But also our larger estuarine ecosystems of Spartina and salt marshes and the interactions
between mangroves, seagrasses and salt marsh.
>>Taillardat: I'm based in Singapore and I'm studying mangrove forests in south Vietnam.
What I'm interested in is the carbon cycle within the mangrove ecosystem.
We really know now that mangrove is like one of the most productive ecosystems to be able
to be able to sequester carbon.
And I'm looking at a specific process of the cycle, which is the transfer from the mangrove
to the estuary.
>>Yando: I'm primarily studying how mangroves are expanding into new areas that are largely
salt marsh.
And then once they are there, how do they establish and then what type of influence
do they have on the surrounding environment.
>>Castro: I am from the Philippines, and basically our sites are located in Typhoon Haiyan-hit
areas.
And then our research is mainly about the multidisciplinary approach in assessing these
typhoon-damaged mangrove areas.
Then we would like to look more into the factors that may contribute to the low carbon stocks
in our mangrove sites.
>>Bean: My paintings are the result of my Ph.D. research into natural history illustration
of Australia's mangrove species.
Australia has forty-four mangrove species; I've painted thirty-two.
So I go into the field.
I find the mangroves.
I take them back to my studio.
I research the plant descriptions.
Make sure that I'm getting absolutely everything right.
And then I draw the plants and then I paint them with watercolor on paper.
>>Moore: The work I've been doing is in coastal vegetated ecosystems, including salt marsh
and mangroves.
And I've looked at species interactions in these systems-how they respond to abiotic
factors.
So, physical stresses and things of that nature.
And so one of the questions we've been asking is how does the origin of seedlings, so where
they come from, interact with how well they survive and grow in different environments.
>>Taillardat: Well, because for like a European person, it's something really exotic.
The mangroves--it's really hard to imagine what it is before coming in.
And then once you get in, you realize like even if it's still on planet Earth, it's a
really different ecosystem compared to all other things I had seen before.
And I like this, the fact it is a really unique place on Earth.
>>Rajkaran: I didnt know what they were the first time I went into a mangrove forest.
I was in my third year of my first degree, and Professor Janine Adams had invited me
to do an honors project on the utilization of mangroves.
And we went on a field trip.
And the very first time we walked in, I had to be told how to walk into a mangrove.
How not to fall over.
And the whole ecosystem was just so complex and yet so unique.
And the interactions between the plants and the animals really inspired something in me
to get into mangrove research.
>>Feller: I was first introduced to mangroves as a mangrove illustrator.
I was a scientific illustrator at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History.
I was asked to go to Belize to develop a technique for doing underwater illustrations.
Mostly planning to draw reef situations.
But funding sources decided they wanted to fund something new.
And the project shifted to mangroves.
So I turned my illustration attention to drawing in mangrove ecosystems.
And it's really the first time I had been into a mangrove.
And it didn't take long for me to know that I felt quite comfortable there.
And that I was finding all kinds of new things.
>>Moore: The first time I remember seeing a mangrove and realizing what it was..ahh...was
when I was on a study abroad program in Kenya in college.
And I remember being on a boat at dusk and seeing bioluminescence in the water and then
looking up and seeing these shadows of trees growing out of the water.
Out of the ocean.
And I just remember being amazed that a tree could grow out of the seawater..ahm..at that
point because I wasn't really familiar with that type of coastal vegetation.
>>Lewis: Well, then I was very interested in the food web associated with mangroves,
and at that particular point in the late sixties and early seventies we didn't know a lot about
this.
We were just discovering that mangroves are very important.
And there were other graduate students at the University of Miami that were documenting
this.
And it was an overwhelming moment for me to go from not knowing what mangroves were, and
hearing that they were bad, to they're wonderful ecosystems.
And so I jumped in with both feet.
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