Mangroves are a crossroad where oceans, freshwater, and land realms meet. They are among the most productive and complex ecosystems on the planet, growing under environmental conditions that would kill ordinary plants very quickly.
Mangrove forests are particularly found in tropical and subtropical regions within 300 of the equator. These tidal areas, such as estuaries and marine shorelines, are frequently inundated with salt water. Strongly in decline, mangrove forests occupy about 15.2 million hectares of tropical coast worldwide: across Africa, Australia, Asia and America (Spalding et al. 2010).