Assessing the Role of Commercial Aquaculture in Displacing Mangrove Forest

To fill a gap in the marine science literature, I calculated the amount of mangrove deforestation in tropical estuaries that is attributable to commercial aquaculture. The eight countries analyzed were Indonesia, Brazil, India, Bangladesh, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Ecuador. Together these countries contain approximately 36% of the world's remaining mangrove forest. One precommercial aquaculture remote sensing survey and one current remote sensing survey were undertaken in the major mangrove holding estuaries in each nation. The time period of the analysis varied by country based on the first arrival of large-scale commercial aquaculture, with the majority of initial surveys occurring in the early to mid-1970s and all the current surveys occurring post-2004. The surveys classified the land cover of 110,557 randomly…