 is Isamart Cortes. She's at Montclair University and we'll be moving back a little bit to mangroves. They're still in the Caribbean too. Okay, can you all hear me? Yes we can. Okay, you can sleep my slides. Okay. I do see your slides too. Okay, great. So like Irina said, my name is Isamart Cortes and my work, my research is on quantifying the role of increasing net evaporation rates on mangrove island vegetation in the Caribbean. So we are going a bit back into mangroves. And the idea is, okay there we go, so the idea is that mangroves, they do provide several beneficial ecosystem services such as blue carbon storage, coastal protection, and habitat for thousands of species. They do reside in tropical and subtropical regions and they are a halophatic species of tree, meaning that they can survive in saline environments, right? But as you're increasing the evaporation rates, then you're also increasing the salinity concentration. And what this project focuses on is looking at the relationship, quantifying the relationship between net evaporation rates and the salinity concentration, the soil stressor concentration in mangrove island systems. So why are we exploring mangrove island systems? Since we're looking to quantify the role of net evaporation rates climate conditions specifically, we have to use areas that are isolated from any anthropogenic influence that also may cause mangrove degradation, which is why we use mangrove island systems. All of these islands are in very remote regions across the Caribbean and what we're looking at is the net evaporation rate. How does evaporation minus precipitation, which is what ENET stands for here, affects the soil stressor balance within mangrove island systems. So all of these areas are in positive net evaporation zones, meaning that the evaporation is greater than the precipitation. So as you increase the evaporation to precipitation ratio, then you're increasing the soil stressor concentration in these mangrove island systems, thus increasing the soil stressor concentration and at a certain point, mangroves begin to die off, which is what you see as an example in this hypersaline lagoon, in this region right here that's a large salt flat, also Florida one very large salt flat areas, and they're all located in positive net evaporation regions. So how do we quantify this? We quantify this with a very simple linear diffusion model and what we're doing is trying to relate the net evaporation rate to the soil stressor concentration increases within an island. But what we're doing with this research is that we're assuming steady state, meaning that there's no salinity concentration changes through time in these islands, and with two boundary conditions dictating the salinity concentration at the ends of the islands when your x equals your radius, then we're able to derive a quadratic function that acts as our salinity concentration profile across an island, assuming that all of the islands are of circular origin. So as you can see in this figure right here in a positive net evaporation region, you're going to see that your salinity concentration starts at S of zero, which is ocean salinity, but increases because there is that imposed net evaporation stress on the island. And we take this model one step further using the critical salinity concentration of black mangroves, which is the interface where black mangroves die off into a die off area within mangrove island. And using the critical salinity concentration of black mangroves, we're able to derive a function that relates vegetated area of an island to net evaporation rates, ocean salinity, and the hydraulic conductivity, again, assuming that these islands are circular. So now we have to derive all of these different parameters for our model. First, we start with the net evaporation data. We have to gather precipitation and evaporation data from different sources to build an overlying net evaporation map, which shows you the extent of net evaporation across the Caribbean, which is our study site, being that the Caribbean has a lot of variability. So what you're seeing here is gathered data from the Tropical Rain Monitoring mission from 1998 till 2016, and evaporation data set from the Wolfs Hole Oceanographic Institute, OA Flex project, again, from 1998 to 2016, because we want to get overlapping years to actually study the net evaporation region across the Caribbean, which is what you see here. So we can begin to guess, to actually make a hypothesis as to how vegetation is going to react, mangrove vegetation is going to react depending on what spatial location they're in. So for example, if you're in Belize, then you can assume that mangrove islands there are going to have a lot of vegetation because they're in a low to negative net evaporation region, as opposed to mangrove islands in Florida, where these islands are actually under a lot of stress due to high net evaporation rates, and there will be less vegetation within this region. Next, we do have to quantify the hydraulic conductivity. Given that all of these islands are in very remote locations, we can't physically go to every single one of these islands because we're working on a large spatial scale. So we actually derive a function for the hydraulic conductivity as a function of the area of red mangroves within an island. Now, this is where species differentiation, species donation comes to play, because red mangroves actually tolerate the least have the lowest critical salinity concentration tolerance out of the four species in the Caribbean. And we're focusing, we're primarily focusing on the interplay between red and black mangroves because white and buttonwood are more geared towards higher elevation areas. And since we're looking at mangrove islands, they're mainly in low topographic regions, which is where red and black mangroves really thrive and reside. So if you have a large area of red mangroves, then you can assume a high hydraulic conductivity rate because the critical salinity concentration for red mangroves hasn't been met in this region, which means that there's a lot of tidal, which means that there's a lot of flushing within the interior of these islands. And how do we actually quantify, how do we gather the area of red mangroves? We do a very simple optical classification analysis using near for red Sentinel-2 imagery, which is at 10 meter resolution, highest resolution open source imagery for near for red analysis. And basically the idea is that red mangroves are able to reflect off more near for red than black mangroves are. So red mangroves actually show up as brighter red image brighter when when you look at a near for red false color composite image and red black mangroves will show up as dollar red. So doing a simple optical classification analysis, we're able to distinguish red versus black mangrove within a mangrove island system and quantify the area of red mangroves per region per each different island. All of this to come up with basically concluding results is that our model actually does a decent job comparing the vegetated area from the field versus the model. So the model and field results are in agreement, meaning that with a few key parameters, we're actually able to quantify the vegetated area based on these parameters based on the hydraulic conductivity, net evaporation rates, outreach, salinity. And what we're planning on doing for future work is that we want to look at how mangrove vegetation is going to decrease or increase depending on the future net evaporation rates using the IPSL climate model. And this is still work in progress. And finally, thank you for letting me present in CSDMS. This is my last slide. This is actually my first CSDMS presentation. So thank you very much.