The Mangrove Restoration Tracker Tool

We know thriving mangroves are key to combating climate change and supporting thriving communities and biodiversity. We also know how challenging the lack of information around effective mangrove restoration efforts and best practices can be. That’s why the Global Mangrove Alliance is very pleased to announce the launch of the Mangrove Restoration Tracker Tool (MRTT) and accompanying User Guide. The tool invites mangrove practitioners to record and track their restoration projects across its lifetime while ensuring best practice towards sustainable long-living mangroves globally.

Built into Global Mangrove Watch platform – the pre-imminent and most widely-recognized mangrove mapping tool – the one-of-a-kind MRTT will 1) significantly benefit mangrove restoration results by identifying and tracking success from past, present, and future mangrove restoration activities and 2) enable learning and information exchange between practitioners.

The second edition of the State of the World’s Mangroves report shows that 8,183km2 of mangroves are considered restorable globally. Restoring half of these mangroves would build habitat that generates over 25 billion commercially important fish and shellfish every year and continue to support 4.1 million small-scale fishers and countless communities that rely on mangroves for their livelihoods. Restoration could safeguard carbon in soil and aboveground biomass equivalent to 1.27gigatons of CO2 as well as mitigate damages from storms and reduce flood risk to some 15 million people every year.

The need for urgent and effective mangrove restoration is evident, as is the need to monitor mangrove restoration projects to ensure their success. Knowing this, the MRTT was designed to underline the success of inclusive and ecological mangrove restoration approaches over mass tree planting; improving mangroves’ rates of survival and function.

All different restoration approaches and projects covering single or multiple outcomes across the full array of ecological and socio-economic benefits of mangroves can be added to MRTT. The tool has a flexible structure designed to capture field and desk-based data on mangrove restoration projects in a standardized format and multiple and ongoing entries are possible within the Tool. For each project, there are three critical components integrated to report across the project lifetime:

1. Pre-restoration site baseline,

2. Restoration interventions,

3. Post-restoration monitoring.

Each section consists of several questions with multiple choice responses, with the intention that data providers can rapidly and comprehensively describe their project.

This means that the conservation community will be able to quantify how specific conservation actions lead to outcomes for biodiversity, mangrove resilience, management effectiveness, communities, and governance. In turn, this will help improve mangrove conservation implementation and build a community to support more effective mangrove restoration projects.

Join us in building a shared and effective mangrove conservation and restoration community.

The Mangrove Restoration Tracker Tool is a Global Mangrove Alliance product developed by the University of Cambridge, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, and WWF in collaboration with 80 conservation practitioners and scientists from around the world.