The role of mangroves in the blue carbon stock is critical and requires special focus. Mangroves are carbon‐rich forests that are not in steady‐state equilibrium at the decadal time scale. Over the last decades, the structure and zonation of mangroves have been largely disturbed by coastal changes and land use conversions. The amount of time since the last disturbance is a key parameter determining forest structure, but it has...

Aim The goal of the study was to quantify changes in the extent of mangroves since the mid‐twentieth century and to test the hypothesis that these changes are driven by ocean waves. Location The pristine 300‐km‐long coast of French Guiana, South America. Methods We produced time series of mangrove maps using archival remote sensing images. We retrieved significant wave heights ( H S ), mean wave periods ( T M ) and mean wave d...

Aim The size structure of a forest canopy is an important descriptor of the forest environment that may yield information on forest biomass and ecology. However, its variability at regional scales is poorly described or understood because of the still prohibitive cost of very high‐resolution imagery as well as the lack of an appropriate methodology. We here employ a novel approach to describe and map the canopy structure of tr...