GALES POINT, Belize — On a narrow stretch of shoreline across from the Gales Point cemetery, Jamal Galves and the rest of the team from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute Belize unload crates of mangrove seedlings and bamboo from the back of a pickup truck. Gales Point, a small Creole village, lies along a thin finger of land surrounded on three sides by a massive lagoon, part of Gales Point Wildlife Sanctuary in central Belize. Over the past few decades, the peninsula has suffered from massive erosion, due to a combination of hurricanes, sea-level rise and mangrove clearance. At this spot, the land is only a few meters wide. “I’m from this community, I know where the mangroves were in the past, so I recognized that something had to be done,” says Galves, the program coordinator for Clearwater in Belize. Usually Galves is here working on Antillean manatees (Trichechus manatus manatus), which thrive in the lagoon’s brackish waters. On cool mornings they congregate around warm underground springs, making soft whishing noises as they stick their nostrils above the water to take a breath. Researchers from Clearwater have been monitoring these manatees for decades. But today Galves is here for mangroves. “Instead of putting in major infrastructures like a seawall, which they don’t have the financial ability to do, we’re trying to fight this issue with a green response,” he says. Across Belize, grassroots projects like this are trying to restore mangroves to prevent erosion, boost biodiversity and fisheries, and…This article was originally published on Mongabay