Sesarmid crabs are important ecosystem engineers in mangroves because they remove a large proportion of mangrove leaf litter. However, the effects on mangrove sediments of sesarmid crab foraging on mangrove leaves has been poorly quantified. Through a laboratory experiment, the present study aimed to quantify changes in nutrient concentrations and enzyme activities in mangrove sediment due to f...

The importance of mangrove forests in carbon sequestration and coastal protection has been widely acknowledged. Large-scale damage of these forests, caused by hurricanes or clear felling, can enhance vulnerability to erosion, subsidence and rapid carbon losses. However, it is unclear how small-scale logging might impact on mangrove functions and services. We experimentally investigated the impa...

Mangroves are traditionally considered to provide important nutrition to tropical estuarine consumers. However, there is still controversy about this, and the extent and importance of these inputs are largely unquantified. In particular, there is no information for food webs of small estuaries that dominate wet–dry tropical coasts, where freshwater inflow is intermittent, leading to highly seas...

Brunei Bay, which receives freshwater discharge from four major rivers, namely Limbang, Sundar, Weston and Menumbok, hosts a luxuriant mangrove cover in East Malaysia. However, this relatively undisturbed mangrove forest has been less scientifically explored, especially in terms of vegetation structure, ecosystem services and functioning, and land-use/cover changes. In the present study, mangro...

Remote sensing has played a crucial role in mapping and understanding of the spatial pattern of mangrove forests and changes in its areal extent caused by natural disasters and anthropogenic forces. So far traditional pixel-based classification of multispectral imagery has been widely applied for broad mapping of mangrove covers. But the recent and more advanced hyperspectral data taken from se...

The mangrove habitat exhibits many unique physical features, one of the most important of which is a salinity gradient. Photosynthetic rates, as measured by leaf stomatal conductance and leaf chlorophyll fluorescence induction, were tested as indicators of salinity stress in seedlings of the red mangrove, Rhizophora mangle, grown under five different salinity levels: 0, 15, 30, 45, and 60 parts...

Reforestation is one of the Philippines’ government efforts to restore and rehabilitate degraded mangrove ecosystems. Although there is recovery of the ecosystem in terms of vegetation, the recovery of closely-linked faunal species in terms of community structure is still understudied. This research investigates the community structure of mangrove crabs under two different management schemes: p...

Deforestation impact studies have generally focused on tropical rainforests or temperate coniferous woodlands. However, extensive clear-cutting is currently occurring in a wide-ranging, but far less recognized habitat: the world's mangrove forests. These coastal forests thrive in areas of low wave action and high sediment availability, where mangrove trees develop dense and productive ecosystem...

A continuing impediment to the taxonomy of reticulate whipray Himantura spp. species complex is absence a type specimen for H. uarnak (Gmelin [ex Forsskål], 1789). Here, specimens were sampled from Jeddah region in Red Sea, assumed locality uarnak, and characterized genetically at cytochrome-oxidase subunit 1 (CO1) locus. One these now fish collection California Academy Sciences was designated ...