READ ME FIRST - HOW TO USE THIS BLOG

READ ME FIRST

Thank you for coming to this blog. You are likely to be here for one of two reasons. Either you’re a friend and curious to know how a fully fledged man can spend much of his adult life playing in mud. Or you are interested in rehabilitating a degraded area of mangrove near you. ‘Daily Mud’ posts are written with friends in mind and though relevant to this project, are not technical by nature. Other articles will cover more in-depth but very practical aspects of the work, and might be more useful to NGO staffers who need inspiration and help with their own project.

Unfortunately this blog has been started after the project commenced. There are a number of reasons for this, but primarily securing land owner agreement has been slower than anticipated. Though publicising this work has always been the intention, a blog was not envisaged at proposal-writing stage. Please forgive the poor timing. So over the course of the next few weeks blogs will be posted that go through the stages we have been through, explain why, and discuss some of the science behind it. Ellison points out that there is a disconnect between the huge amount (of science) known about mangrove rehab, and what happens on the ground. This is supported by the fact that so many mangrove planting projects fail. Hopefully this blog will go a little way to bridge this gap.

If you are looking for answers on a specific topic try the ‘POSTING BY TOPIC’ categories on the right side. Note also that the blogs will have embedded links within, to the most relevant articles and papers to explain points in more detail.

Though they will be covered in more detail in their own postings, two issues with our site (a former aquaculture pond of 0.7ha) are worth highlighting now. The first is our objectives. Ecological Mangrove Rehabilitation is a technique that we believe in, but it needs a good demonstration site to show it working in Thailand. By definition, the objective of EMR is to re-establish a functioning mangrove ecosystem: thus not mangrove for timber, charcoal, coastal defence, erosion control etc. The local community use Nypa fruticans and Ceriops sp, (p41 of this link) so there will be a bias towards these species. But the hope is that soon there will be a stable, biodiverse system in this pond, providing most of the environmental and ecological services that mangrove provides. We also wanted to test actually implementing the theory with practical action on the ground.

The second problem that needs to be mentioned early on is that the whole pond floor is too low relative to sea level. As our distinguished visitor Dr Ong said, in Watson’s classification of mangrove area, we have effectively a mudflat that gets wet everyday. Therefore much of the work on our site tries to rectify this issue.

I hope you enjoy this blog and find it useful. Please feel free to comment or get in contact to provide ideas, correct mistakes or ask for help. We are not experts, so if we can’t answer your problem we might be able to point you in the right direction.