Abstract
This study presents an updated global mangrove forest baseline for 2010: Global Mangrove Watch (GMW) v2.5. The previous GMW maps (v2.0) of the mangrove extent are currently considered the most comprehensive available global products, however areas were identified as missing or poorly mapped. Therefore, this study has updated the 2010 baseline map to increase the mapping quality and completeness of the mangrove extent. This revision resulted in an additional 2660 km2 of mangroves being mapped yielding a revised global mangrove extent for 2010 of some 140,260 km2. The overall map accuracy was estimated to be 95.1% with a 95th confidence interval of 93.8–96.5%, as assessed using 50,750 reference points located across 60 globally distributed sites. Of these 60 validation sites, 26 were located in areas that were remapped to produce the v2.5 map and the overall accuracy for these was found to have increased from 82.6% (95th confidence interval: 80.1–84.9) for the v2.0 map to 95.0% (95th confidence interval: 93.7–96.4) for the v2.5 map. Overall, the improved GMW v2.5 map provides a more robust product to support the conservation and sustainable use of mangroves globally.
Highlights
At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties 26 (COP26) in 2021, an international agreement was made to end deforestation by 2030
Mangrove forests support a large number of ecosystem services [9], such as carbon storage and sequestration [10], coastal protection [11], food production [9], and tourism [12]
The ambitious goals set by the Global Mangrove Alliance (GMA), to restore 20% of mangrove forests by 2030, require accurate baselines upon which their efforts can be built
Summary
At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties 26 (COP26) in 2021, an international agreement was made to end deforestation by 2030. To ensure adherence to this, accurate global scale maps of forested ecosystems will be critical. One such ecosystem is mangrove forests, which have witnessed an elevated rate of loss compared to terrestrial forests over the past decades [1] with regional losses exceeding 3%, driven by anthropogenic disturbances [1,2,3] such as conversion to aquaculture [4] or agriculture [5], urban expansion [6], oil palm plantations [7], and climate change [8]. Accurate baseline maps of extent are essential for a local and global ecosystem service accounting as well as verifying COP26 goals. Baseline maps are the keystone for mapping environmental descriptors that characterise this ecosystem, such as biomass [14], understanding the drivers of land cover change [2], and locating primary regions for potential restoration
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