About This Project

Kenya loses about 0.7% of its mangrove forest cover annually, mainly due to human activities and climate change, reducing coastal protection and fish breeding habitats. This study examines how microbial communities vary across healthy, recovering, and degraded sites. Using metagenomic analysis of sediment samples, it aims to use microbial profiles as indicators of ecosystem health, supporting more effective and holistic restoration strategies beyond tree planting.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Mangroves support fisheries, protect shorelines, and store large amounts of carbon, making them vital for both ecosystems and coastal communities. Along the Kenyan coast, however, they face extensive degradation from overharvesting, climate change, pollution, and development, leaving some areas heavily damaged, others under partial restoration, and only a few intact. Restoration efforts have mainly focused on replanting trees, yet the role of microbial communities in sediments and around root systems has been largely overlooked. A shift in their composition can signal the success or failure of restoration long before physical recovery is visible. Understanding how microbial profiles differ across degraded, recovering, and healthy mangroves is therefore critical to designing restoration strategies that rebuild not just tree cover but fully functioning ecosystems.

What is the significance of this project?

Mangrove ecosystems are one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. The microbial communities continuously break down dead plant matter, recycling essential nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, which the mangroves then use to grow. This microbe-nutrient-plant relationship is vital for the ecosystem's productivity and the conservation of coastal fisheries. Therefore, protecting and restoring mangrove communities must include an understanding of their microbial populations.

This study investigates the hypothesis that microbial diversity and functional profiles differ significantly between healthy, moderately degraded, and heavily degraded mangrove sites. Understanding these differences is critical, as shifts in microbial composition can serve as early, sensitive indicators of ecosystem health and can signal the success of restoration outcomes, often long before visible physical changes in tree cover occur.

What are the goals of the project?

Mangrove sediments harbour the microorganisms that form the mangrove microbiome, and therefore, samples will be collected in triplicate from three mangrove sites representing different degradation levels: a heavily degraded site, a moderately degraded site under restoration, and a healthy, undisturbed site. Nucleic acids will be extracted from these samples using a commercial kit. Shotgun metagenomic libraries will then be prepared for sequencing, and the resulting data analysed for taxonomic and functional profiles. This will allow assessment of how microbial communities vary across degradation levels, providing insights to guide mangrove restoration and conservation efforts. The sample collection will be carried out in November 2025, and the downstream analyses will be carried out from then on.