Newton Fund - Wallacea ProgrammeNewton Fund - Wallacea ProgrammeMangroves provide essential ecosystem services including fish habitat, coastal protection, and carbon sequestration. Although Indonesia has lost 40% of its mangroves, the country still supports some of the highest mangrove biomass in the world. The country has committed to restore at least 510 km2by 2024.
As elsewhere, the success of restoration activities is far from guaranteed, and is rarely monitored over appropriate timescales. Important lessons can be learned from successes and failures to help effectively restore these important forest ecosystems both in Wallacea and elsewhere.
In North Sulawesi, scientists led by Edinburgh Napier University and Universitas Diponegoro are assessing the community structure and functional diversity of restored mangroves to assist restoration plans.
Mangrove restoration in Indonesia involves planting monoculture stands, and implementing measures to help mixed-species regeneration.
Since mangrove ecosystem functions are often mediated by animals and micro-organisms, monitoring and evaluation of restoration practices needs to move beyond the trees.
Environmental DNA and species interaction networks reveal significant differences in the structure and complexity of reference and restored mangrove 15-years after restoration began. These complex interactions and their consequences for ecosystem functioning would be overlooked if only the numbers of plant and animal species were considered.
The team is generating a set of indicators and tools to help evaluate mangrove restoration activities and inform future actions in Wallacea and beyond.
O’Connell et al. 2021. Assessing mangrove restoration practices using species-interaction networks. Restoration Ecology. e13546
Cannicciet al. 2021. A functional analysis reveals extremely low redundancy in global mangrove invertebrate fauna. PNAS 118, e2016913118
Yando et al. 2021. Conceptualizing ecosystem degradation using mangrove forests as a model system. Biological Conservation 263. 109355
