Salt marshes and tidal flats
Salt marshes are grassy tidal wetlands in cooler or drier coasts; in Atlas, "sand and mudflats" are the bare areas between and behind mangroves.
Salt marshes are tidal wetlands dominated by salt-tolerant grasses and shrubs. They are the temperate and sub-tropical cousin of mangroves and are an important blue-carbon habitat in places such as North Africa and South Africa.
Tidal flats are bare sand or mud exposed at low tide. They are not vegetation, but they are vital feeding grounds for wading birds and mark where mangroves could expand.
In Atlas. The Lamu dataset contains about 28,000 polygons of sand and mudflats next to the mangrove, which lets Atlas compare how much bare flat lies beside the forest. The global salt-marsh dataset (UNEP-WCMC) is catalogued to be loaded later.
Related reading
More in Knowledge Base
- The mangrove species of East Africa
- What Atlas is, and why it is more than a mangrove map
- What data is coming next
- Reading the sea-turtle tracking data
- What mangroves do for people (ecosystem services)
- LAPSSET: why a corridor project matters to mangroves
- Sea-level rise and the "coastal squeeze"
- Blue carbon projects and carbon markets
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