Northern Mesoamerican Pacific mangroves
RESOLVE 614
The Northern Mesoamerican Pacific Coast mangroves fringe the lagoons and estuaries of northwestern Mexico, spanning the southern Baja California peninsula (Baja California Sur) and the Gulf of California coasts of Sonora and northern Sinaloa, where they form the northernmost mangroves on the Pacific Coast of North America. The forests are built from the classic neotropical mangrove quartet: red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle), white mangrove (Laguncularia racemosa), black mangrove (Avicennia germinans), and buttonwood (Conocarpus erectus). Sitting in an arid, transitional zone between tropical and temperate seas, the climate is dry with only occasional summer and winter rain, and the nutrient-poor conditions keep many stands stunted, sometimes barely a meter tall. Despite their modest stature, these mangroves are vital nurseries for oysters, crabs, juvenile fish, and invertebrate larvae and shelter birds such as the San Blas jay and purplish-backed jay. The ecoregion is classed as critical or endangered, having lost large areas to coastal development, which makes its remaining tangled, salt-tolerant thickets a conservation priority.
About the mangroves biome
Coastal tidal forests of salt-tolerant trees rooted in sheltered estuaries and shorelines of the tropics and subtropics. Mangroves buffer coasts from storms, store large amounts of carbon, and serve as nurseries for fish and shellfish.
Collections for this ecoregion
No curated collection's plants all fit this ecoregion's zone range. We surface a collection only when every member would grow here — partial fits get filtered out rather than mislead. As the catalog and the curated set both grow, this section will fill in.