JOR 221 Project 8
With saltier, warmer and higher water, all because of an increase in CO2, saving the mangroves becomes Loose’s number one priority.
Like Loose said, these communities are filled with people who fish on the coastline, making it harder for them to earn a living if majority of their fish are dead or contaminated.
Without fishing, these local economies around the mangrove swamps would suffer drastically; especially their only other means of revenue would be rice farming, according to Loose.
The restoration of these mangroves can have a positive impact on its immediate surrounding communities but also around the world.
With the lost of mangrove swamps, CO2 levels would rise resulting in numerous things that would negatively affect our oceans; so protecting and restoring them is why Loose has devoted his study to saving mangrove ecosystems.
Restoring the Garden of Eden
Brice Loose sets out to restore a highly endangered ecosystem in Africa
By Kevin Murray
Brice Loose is an assistant Professor of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island’s GSO campus.
He has devoted his most recent project and time to restoring the mangrove ecosystems in Africa.
These Mangrove swamp areas are a highly threatened area, on the very of extinction. These ecosystems have had a decline of around 2 percent per year globally, according to Loose’s website.
The importance of the mangroves is simple; with them we would alter our atmosphere in favor of carbon dioxide or CO2.
When there is an abundance of CO2 in our atmosphere, a “green house gas” effect takes place heating up the earth and our oceans as well as melting our polar ice caps.
Loose specializes in measuring gases in our oceans and the effect that they will have on our polar ice caps; so keeping this mangrove swamps from being totally destroyed is his most recent priority.
According to Loose, in 2006 Oceanium Dakar, a Senegalese NGO began a Mangrove restoration project which got him on board with the idea of planting and mobilizing the mangrove swamp area.
As it says on Loose’s website, they began to mobilize these areas by having villagers plant mangrove seeds around West Africa.
It is stated on Loose’s website that in 2009, over 35 million seeds were planted in over 2000 villages.
Although they have had success in the past, variability’s such as the level of salt in the rivers and/or the temperature.
Loose explains that mangroves thrive in water with lower temperatures and higher salinity. These fortunate growing areas are plagues with two tidal wave floods annually making it difficult to grow mangroves.
Mangroves like others, sustain it’s own area buy minimizing the seawater evaporation that occurs underneath the water they are growing on.
The overall implication of losing mangrove swamps would be absolutely detrimental to the world and our oceans.