[Daniel Friess and Zhen Zhang walking into mangrove forest]
Daniel Friess, (interview): “So you know around the world there’s about 70 species of mangroves but we only have one here in Louisiana. It’s this one here and it has these beautiful white flowers. It’s pretty kind of short and shrubby because we’re basically at the northernmost limit of mangroves in the world here.”
[Mangrove flower and roots]
Daniel Friess, (interview): “The great thing about mangroves is that they’re these kind of unsung superheroes. You think they’re just, they’re not that important or they’re just there, they’re in the way, but they are protecting our shorelines, they’re creating fisheries, they’re a great place for recreation and education and they’re taking up our carbon emissions. And they’re doing all of this for free. And hundreds of millions of people around the tropics rely on the benefits and the livelihoods provided by mangroves.”
[Mangroves]
Daniel Friess, (interview): “It’s the root systems that are able to hold the soil together really well. They’re able to add roots and add soil so they’re also able to build up their elevation of the surface so it can keep pace as sea level changes. And then all the roots and all the biomass is a really good sponge to incoming wave energies.”
[Grand Isle beach waves hitting the shore]
[Mangroves]
[Friess and Zhang walking through mangrove forest]
Zhen Zhang (interview): “Human activities are targeting on this precious ecosystems. Mangroves are along coastal regions, so coastal region could be used for port construction, could be used for the aquacultural ponds expansion and also for some oil palm tree plantations. So for some economic targets the mangroves are targeted by human activities for deforestation.”
[Mangroves along Louisiana’s coast]
Zhen Zhang (interview): “While our study is a pretty hopeful story but we don’t want our study being misunderstood as the ‘mangroves are pretty safe, we don’t need to care about them anymore’. So our point is we showed some early signs of conservation and restoration and so we want to say if we want to continue this positive trend we have to protect them more and keep conservation and restoration efforts.”
[Friess and Zhang walking through mangrove forest]
[Friess and Zhang viewing signage showing Louisiana’s land loss crisis]
Daniel Friess, (interview): “The future is uncertain for mangroves. They’re still under threat in many parts of the world by human activity so now we’ve got to build on this. We’ve shown that it works and let’s make sure that we’re still having the same success story in 10, 20, 50 years.”
[Mangroves along Louisiana’s coast]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.