Postdoc Qi Zhang Co-Authors Two New Papers on Mangrove Ecosystems in India’s Sundarbans Biosphere Region

Qi Zhang, a post-doctoral associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently published two papers on the mangrove ecosystems in India’s Sundarbans Biosphere Region (SBR), a biodiversity hotspot that is acutely susceptible to the impacts of climate change. The region makes up nearly 3 percent of the Earth’s total area of mangroves, and has been designated as a UNESCO world heritage site for its profound social-ecological and biodiversity importance.

In the first paper, published in the journal Science of The Total Environment, the authors identified and examined natural and human forces that affect the dynamics of the region’s mangrove ecosystems, and found that climate change is the most dominant driver of the degradation of ecosystem services in the SBR.

In the second paper, published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, the authors quantified the biophysical and economic values of key ecosystem services, based mainly on net primary productivity (NPP) models. They found that NPP increased from 1982-1999, but declined significantly from 2000-2017, suggesting that the effects of climate change and land-use dynamics on ecosystem services were significant over the past two decades.

Read more about Zhang’s Pardee Center research on human-environment interactions and land-use dynamics here.