OPTIMIZING MANGROVE CARBON SEQUESTRATION WITH A MECHANISTIC MANGROVE HYDRO-MORPHODYNAMIC MODEL

Mangrove conservation has been considered one of the global high-priorities, e.g., by the UN or nations with their national determination contribution. Even though the global coordinated efforts have been conducted, many mangrove conservation and restoration projects (about 80-90percent) experienced failures. The main reason is the lack of understanding of the mangrove ecological requirements and the mismatch of the mangrove species. Acknowledging mangroves as the forefront of climate change solutions requires a well-defined conservation- restoration strategy. Even though knowledge of mangrove ecology is well appreciated, their feedback loop interactions with the changing environment are still lacking. The combination of the high failure rate of conservation- restoration and the lack of mechanistic understanding of mangroves' response to the environment may hinder the wide adoption of mangroves as a climate change solution. Therefore, our work introduces the mechanistic modelling of mangrove-hydro-morpho-dynamic to explore strategic mangrove planting on an idealized open coast mudflat setting.