ABSTRACT
The naturally high productivity of tropical mangroves has traditionally been exploited for a wide variety of purposes, both as sources of forestry or fisheries products and they have also been used for human settlement. Southeast Asian mangrove forests are declining at alarming rates, due to the increasing demand for land to be allocated to food, industrial production and urban settlements. Biotic influences on mangrove forest ecosystem structure and function are expected to be more important in systems with weak external forcing or high biodiversity. Mangrove forests are highly diversified due to the large variability, for example, in geomorphology and tidal activities, and a number of different functional types of mangroves have been described. Hydrodynamics in the mangrove forest is controlled by tides, mangrove vegetation and geometry of the mangrove waterways. The low nutrient concentrations affect the primary production in mangrove creeks, and the production has often been found to be strongly nutrient limited.
