Climatic requirements for mangroves: what does ecological niche modelling reveal? – Preliminary results

Mangroves are forests in the intertidal zone along (sub)tropical coastlines. This vulnerable ecosystem is under threat of increasing coastal human population and land-use changes. Global warming has a major impact on the mangrove distribution as sea level is rising and the position of the intertidal zones is moving landwards. Next to this, an increase of temperature creates the possibility for mangroves to move polewards beyond their current distribution. By investigating the temperature at the mangrove latitudinal range limits, we found that (1) there is not one isotherm that coincides with mangrove latitudinal limits: monthly air and sea surface temperature are highly variable among congeneric mangrove limits, (2) the larger distribution of the genus Avicennia compared to the genus Rhizophora is reflected in the temperature requirements: Avicennia limits are colder than Rhizophora limits (Quisthoudt et al., submitted).