Intertidal mangrove forests have most recently been estimated to cover at least 81,500 km2 across the tropics and sub-tropics (Hamilton and Casey, 2016) though they experience numerous threats to their survival, with land reclamation (Peng et al., 2016-in this issue), large-scale commercial agriculture and aquaculture (Primavera, 2006, Richards and Friess, 2016), and small-scale subsistence uses (UNEP, 2014) seriously reducing mangrove habitat quantity and quality. Direct, anthropogenic land cover change also interacts with indirect stressors on the mangrove ecosystem, including pollution (Bayen et al., 2016, Fusi et al., 2016) and sea level rise (Krauss et al., 2014, Lovelock et al., 2015), culminating in a loss of almost 2% of the world's mangroves between 2000 and 2012 (Hamilton and Casey, 2016).