The Southern Atlantic Brazilian mangroves form a chain of estuarine and brackish tidal forests scattered along the South Atlantic coast of Brazil, reaching from the southeastern shoreline near the Paraíba do Sul estuary south toward Santa Catarina and including the Bahia and Espírito Santo coasts. The canopy is built from the classic Atlantic mangrove trio: red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle), black mangrove (Avicennia), and white mangrove (Laguncularia racemosa), trees that root in shifting tidal sediments and reach roughly nine to twenty meters tall. The setting is tropical and humid, with rainfall and dry seasons that vary from one stretch of coast to the next. These forests serve as nurseries for fish, crabs, shrimp, and mollusks, host sea turtles and the West Indian manatee, and provide stopover habitat for migratory shorebirds, yet they are pressured by urban expansion, timber cutting, and industrial pollution. For coastal gardeners, the takeaway is ecological rather than ornamental: mangroves are specialized salt-tolerant wetland trees that anchor shorelines rather than border plants for cultivated beds.
Marker placed inside the RESOLVE 2017 polygon at 8.0°S, 34.9°W.
Climate snapshot for this ecoregion
°C
°F
Current zone range (2011–2040)
12b-13b
Plotwright
CHELSA-derived typical winter month at this ecoregion's bbox grid.
Projected (2041–2070)
13a-13b
Plotwright
Where the CHELSA models say the typical winter month is heading.
Average warming this ecoregion is on track for: +3.0°F by mid-century. SSP3-7.0 (current trajectory) · CHELSA v2.1 bio06 sampled across 10 of 10 points within this ecoregion's bounding box.
At a glance
Dominant biome
Mangroves
Realm
Neotropic
Approximate area
3,912 sq mi
Conservation tier
Nature Could Reach Half Protected (Dinerstein NNH 2)
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.
Catalog plants suited to this ecoregion
Computed from each plant's stated USDA zone range against this ecoregion's CHELSA-derived current zone range, with the CHELSA mid-century warming delta applied for the projection. Plants whose stated range falls outside both the current and projected zone end up dropped; the rest land in one of the three buckets below.
Currently suited · 4
These plants fit the ecoregion as it is today, but the mid-century projection moves them outside their stated zone range — plan for them to struggle by 2070.
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.