Report

FIELD REPORT TEMPLATE

Marketing title Mangroves of Kenya PI name Dr. Mark Huxham Research site/ region Gazi Bay, Kwale District Country Kenya Research site latitude/ longitude 4° 25´S, 39°50´E Protected area status None Date field report completed 21 December 2009 Period covered by this report From January 2009 to December 2009 Report completed by (name) Mark Huxham

Dear Friends, I do hope you are all well. I am writing to say thank you once again for your contributions to our project, and to give you a brief up-date on the progress of our work. I am lucky to be PI of this project for many reasons; but one of the most important for me is the quality of the volunteers we have worked with. This season was no exception; Bernard, Joseph, Kairo, Martin and I thoroughly enjoyed working with you all and were very pleased with the results we achieved. Our work this year confirmed some of the encouraging trends we had documented last year.

Do you remember having to measure hundreds of trees (and count thousands of leaves)? How could you forget! Well, the point of all that labour was to document the expanding aboveground biomass of our planted plots. As you can see from the results summarized below, we now have substantial growth in our plots along with clear differences between species; there is no doubt that Avicennia marina is the most vigorously growing species at the Kinondo site. But, interestingly, it is not Avicennia (Avicennia marina) that is recruiting as a wild species into our plots. By counting the 'wildings' we can see that this species is facilitating the growth of others; we hope this will eventually lead to the establishment of mixed natural stands. The hours that you spent measuring the physical variables in the plots - water, salinity, redox and the rest - help us establish why this is the case, as the young trees modify the physical habitat leading to colonization of new seedlings. And what about the below-ground biomass (the roots)? Well, some of...