Blue Carbon
Coastal habitats like these mangroves are very good at trapping carbon dioxed from the atmosphere and burying it in ocean sediments where it can't contribute to climate change.
Coastal marine ecosystems including seagrass, saltmarsh and mangroves trap carbon in their tissues and sediments. This makes is less available to the atmosphere and therefore helps mitigate climate change. Quantifying the extent and function of blue carbon ecosystems is non-trivial since they occur in marine environments, which presents significant measurement and monitoring challenges. We use remote sensing and field techniques to measure the distribution and abundance of blue carbon ecosystems; field and laboratory techniques to measure the amount of carbon present; and modelling techniques to understand how environmental factors affect carbon stocks.
See: Saunders et al. 2015, Lyons et al. 2015, Samper-Villarreal et al. 2016