Abstract
Mangroves provide multiple different ecological services such as acting as juevenile fish nurseries and preventing coastal erosion. Despite these services, anthropogenic activites have caused mangrove distributions to dwindle and become threatened. Despite mangrove forest structure being straightforward to measure, there are gaps in mangrove structure knowledge. While common forestry techniques are commonly applied to mangrove forests, there have been few studies evaluating this application. By using a forestry index created and applied in a previous study, the bark-fissure index (BFI), the quantifiable bark index was applied to Laguncularia racemosa and Avicennia germinans to expand on the forest structure data of mangroves. Regressional analysis found that when taking in account of overall BFI and overall number of fissures of L. racemosa and A. germinans, there was no relationship between diameter at breast height (DBH) and either variable. When broken down by species, only L. racemosa showed a significant relationship between DBH and BFI and a significant relationship between DBH and number of fissures. There was no significant statistical difference in BFI between L. racemosa and A. germians and the number of fissures between each species was also not significant. Above ground biomass density was significant between L. racemosa and A. germinans. The hope is that this baseline data will be expanded upon in the future with different studies forming from the application of BFI. Hopefully this application of a forestry metric will be successful in creating a new metric with new implications for mangrove forest structure research.