Mangrove forests are highly efficient at capturing and storing carbon from the air; in fact, they can hold three to five times as much carbon as the same area of terrestrial forest can. So, researchers in many countries are working to measure how much carbon is stored in mangrove forests.

Researchers from 14 international and local institutions came together in 2021 to measure, for the first time, total mangrove carbon stocks in the central American country of Belize; their findings were published last year. Now, researchers from that assessment are applying their knowledge elsewhere. Hannah Morrissette, Ph.D., a coastal wetland biogeochemist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and one of the field team members of the Belize assessment, is working with Tania Romero, M.S., an aquatic tropical ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and others to assess the mangrove carbon stocks in Panama.