Mangrove Geographic Distribution Over Time

Climate change has always been an impending disaster, and is becoming an issue of pressing concern more and more every year. Countless efforts have been made to study the long-term effects of climate change, however this data is multifaceted in nature, and can be studied from a variety of angles. The goal of our research is to study the available data on the population of mangroves - groups of shrubs, or small trees, living in saline coastal intertidal zones, and studying the change in their distribution over time. The change in global distribution was studied based on distribution in the previous year, as well as ocean heat content, salinity, temperature, halosteric sea level, thermosteric sea level, and total steric sea level. The predictive model that performed significantly better than the rest was a support vector regressor, which yielded an $r^2$ value of 0.9998.