NASA researcher nets first measure of Africa's coast...( Impoverished fishermen along the coa...)

Impoverished fishermen along the coast of tropical African countries like Mozambique and Madagascar may have only a few more years to eke out a profit from one of their nations' biggest agricultural exports. Within a few decades, they may no longer have a livelihood at all.

That's because swampy mangrove forests essential breeding grounds for fish and shellfish in these countries are being destroyed by worsening pollution, encroaching real estate development, and deforestation necessary to sustain large-scale commercial shrimp farming.

The decline of these forests threatens much of Africa's coastal food supply and economy. The destruction of mangroves -- one of Earth's richest natural resources also has implications for everything from climate change to biodiversity to the quality of life on Earth.

Growing up in Cotonou, Benin, environmental scientist Lola Fatoyinbo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) passed polluted mangroves daily. Inspired to help save the forests, she began a mission as a graduate student in the United States to gain more insight about African mangroves.

Her studies have brought her back to Africa, where she has journeyed along the coastlines to test a new satellite technique for measuring the area, height, and biomass of mangrove forests. She developed and employed a method that can be used across the continent, overcoming expensive, ad hoc, and inconsistent modes of ground-based measurement. Fatoyinbo's approach recently produced what she believes is the first full assessment of the continent's mangrove forests.

"We've lost more than 50 percent of the world's mangrove forests in a little over half a century; a third of them have disappeared in the last 20 years alone," said Fatoyinbo, whose earlier study of Mozambique's coastal forests laid the groundwork for the continent-wide study. "Hopefully this technique will offer scientists and officials a method of estimating change in th
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