Introduction: Mangroves cover 240.000 km2 of sheltered subtropical and tropical coast-lines (Lugo, 1990; Twilley et al., 1992), which forms a small portion of the world’s total coastal ocean (26.000.000 km2) and even less percentage of the forested land-scape. Yet this landscape features 350,000 km of shorelines, including continental and oceanic islands, that are considered important to the productivity of tropical estuaries (Boto et al., 1985; Lugo, 1990; Twilley et al., 1996) and significant to global biogeochemical processes (Twilley et al., 1992; Bouillon et al., 2008a).
Estuaries and coastal ecosystems represent significant contributions to the secondary……
