With thousands of forage fish swimming between the mangrove roots and the high diversity of species making up each food web, it is easy to see that the mangrove lagoons at the Galapagos Islands still display their great natural condition.

On April 2015 an expedition lead by researchers of the Charles Darwin Foundation was done to these remote islands, to conduct studies related with biodiversity and mangrove carbon sequestration.

Mangrove forests provide many important ecosystem services for humans; but despite these benefits they continue to be destroyed at an alarming rate. So fast in fact, that in the last 50 years we have lost almost 50% of the earth’s mangrove forests. The mangroves of the Galapagos’ are a clear example of how these forests used to be in the past before human intervention. Not only are they hot spots for biodiversity, but they also represent the home for many large species that have historically been overhunted or overfished.