Walk With Me

Walk With Me, originally uploaded by tropicaLiving.

Mangrove Forest @ Mangrove Information Center of Denpasar, Bali

Mangroves are trees and shrubs that grow along a saline strip along the coast, now and then swamped by tides. The thin roots provide a habitat for shrimps and small fish, break up waves and hold back silt and soil from that damage coral reefs.

Mangroves can keep rising seas at bay to a certain extent, giving communities more time to adjust. The trees can help people cope with heatwaves and help break up waves in the event of a tropical storm.

Like in many parts of Indonesia, vast swathes of mangrove forest in "the neck of Bali", a strip of land that connects a tiny peninsula in the south to the main part of the island, were turned into shrimp ponds during a boom in the 1980s.

But the ponds were soon abandoned, leaving large areas barren. Scientists later discovered that violent waves were chipping away at the coast, sparking fears that lower part of the island could be cut off in a decade's time.

A government project sponsored by Japan's development arm set off in the early 1990s to restore the area's vast mangroves, filling about 1,000 hectares of land with nearly 20 types of mangrove...(Reuters)

Canon EOS 50D
EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM
RAW proccessed with Digital Photo Pro
TIFF proccessed with Adobe Photoshop CS3