State of the Art Information on Mangrove Ecosystems in Indonesia

Indonesia is a tropical archipelago with coastlines measuring a total length of 95,181 km, making it the country with the fourth longest coastline in the world (EarthTrends WRI, 2003, and Rompas, RM.2009). All along the coast are the estuaries of rivers great and small that flow the whole year round thereby enabling mangroves to thrive, particularly on shores sheltered from the waves, such as lagoons, deltas, coral and sand bars. Currently, Indonesia’s mangroves cover 30,000 square kilometres, 21% of the global total mangrove area, and contain 45 (not including introduced species) of the world’s 75 species of true mangrove (Spalding et al., 2010). As a result, Indonesia is known as the country possessing the most mangroves, both in terms of area and number of species.