Save trees..................Save forests!!!

The success or value of any project, be it the construction of the pyramids of ancient Egypt or the nursing of a baby, can only be gauged after as long a time as possible; the pyramids have endured centuries of weathering and man's destructive activities, the health of the grown up human being is greatly the result of infant care.
The productivity of any ecosystem is taken for granted, until when the system begins to deteriorate and perceptive people sound the alarm. This happened with the mangroves; as early as the seventies UNESCO sounded the alarm. It took some ten years of persuasion to convince funding agencies that mangroves far from being wastelands, provide directly and indirectly for the livelihood of millions of people of the coastal area of the tropical belt. Obvious and hidden services and benefits provided by the mangrove ecosystem had always been taken for granted by the local people, but the same mangrove swamps had been hotly condemned as hazards to navigation and unhealthy places for humans, by the early European navigators of the age of discoveries and others after them.

Mangroves (generally) are trees and shrubs that grow in saline coastal habitats in the tropics and subtropics. The word is used in at least three senses,

(1) most broadly to refer to the habitat and entire plant assemblage or mangal , for which the terms mangrove swamp and mangrove forest are also used,

(2) to refer to all trees and large shrubs in the mangal,

(3) narrowly to refer to the mangrove family of plants, the Rhizophoraceae, or even more specifically just to mangrove trees of the genus Rhizophora. Mangals are found in depositional coastal environments where fine sediments, often with high organic content, collect in areas protected from high energy wave action.

Once established, roots of mangrove plants provide a habitat for oysters and help to impede water flow, thereby enhancing the deposition of sediment in areas where it is already occurring. Usually, the fine, anoxic sediments under mangroves act as sinks for a variety of heavy (trace) metals which are scavenged from the overlying seawater by colloidal particles in the sediments. In areas of the world where mangroves have been removed for development purposes, the disturbance of these underlying sediments often creates problems of trace metal contamination of seawater and biota.

Mangroves protect the coast from erosion, surge storms, especially during hurricanes, and tsunamis. Their massive root system is efficient at dissipating wave energy. Likewise, they slow down tidal water enough that its sediment is deposited as the tide comes in and is not re-suspended when the tide leaves, except for fine particles. As a result, mangroves build their own environment. Because of the uniqueness of the mangrove ecosystems and their protection against erosion, they are often the object of conservation programs including national Biodiversity Action Plans.