Importance of mangroves and coastal lagoons in coastal areas
Answers
Explanation:
Importance of Mangroves :
Mangroves protect shorelines from damaging storm and hurricane winds, waves, and floods. Mangroves also help prevent erosion by stabilizing sediments with their tangled root systems. They maintain water quality and clarity, filtering pollutants and trapping sediments originating from land.
Serving as valuable nursery areas for shrimp, crustaceans, mollusks, and fishes, mangroves are a critical component of fishing industries. These habitats provide a rich source of food while also offering refuge from predation. Snook (Centropomus undecimalis), gray snapper (Lutjanus griseus), tarpon (Megalops atlanticus), jack (Caranx spp.), sheepshead (Archosargus probatocephalus), and red drum (Sciaenops ocellatus) all feed in the mangroves. Florida’s fisheries would suffer a dramatic decline without access to healthy mangrove habitats.
Mangroves Support Threatened and Endangered Species.
People have utilized mangrove trees as a renewable resource. Harvested for durable, water-resistant wood, mangroves have been used in building houses, boats, pilings, and furniture. The wood of the black mangrove and buttonwood trees has also been utilized in the production of charcoal. Tannins and other dyes are extracted from mangrove bark. Leaves have been used in tea, medicine, livestock feed, and as a substitute for tobacco for smoking.
Importance of coastal lagoons:
Coastal lagoons are among the most productive ecosystems in the world (Knoppers, 1994; Duck and da Silva, 2012), sustaining important environmental services such as fisheries (Pauly and Yáñez-Arancibia, 1994; Cañedo-Argüelles et al., 2012).
Coastal lagoons represent over 12% of the South America coastline and coincide with densely populated areas (Gönenç and Wolflin, 2004; Esteves et al., 2008).
Their importance for biodiversity conservation has been recognized extensively (Barbosa et al., 2004; Isacch, 2008; Soutullo et al., 2010).
Particularly, choked coastal lagoons are inland shallow waters periodically connected with the ocean by a narrow channel that opens through a sand barrier.
These lagoons are physically dominated systems with large salinity and hydrodynamic fluctuations driven by the intermittent connection with the ocean through the sandbar (Kjerfve, 1994).
The connection with the ocean is probably the single most important factor governing the structure and functioning of the resident biotic communities (Smakhtin, 2004).