EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Mangrove Forest, San Cristóbal Estuary
San Blas, western Mexico

Explanation:  This week we find ourselves silently slipping with the mild current down a labyrinth of channels in a flooded forest.  With some luck, we spot roseate spoonbills, wood storks, black-bellied tree ducks, and northern jacanas ... all denizens of this brackish-water thicket.  

We are half way down the Pacific coast of Mexico in the state of Nayarit, in the extensive area of mangroves outside the town of San Blas.  These  forests of the estuaries contain red, black, white, and button mangrove trees. 

More than just providing for amazing regional biodiversity, mangrove forests also can provide critical ecological services of sequestering carbon, harboring healthy populations of fish, and buffering the flooding effects of major storm surges.  

But their future conservation is in question, as mangroves are cut for a wood source, and are threatened with pollution and with loss of nutrients from drainage.  

A local conservation group, the Mangrove Environmental Protection Group or El Manglar, was formed in 1993 to protect these mangroves from excessive impacts of tourism and shrimp farms.  El Manglar has worked with local communities to guide sustainable ecotourism and fishing, and to promote conservation education.