Every December, one of the parks in the center of Paris called the Garden of Plants creates a large and colorful display to help visitors understand different environments in other parts of the world. This year the focus was on mangrove forests, which are found in warm waters of tropical forests throughout the world. These forests are very important, but have been declining due to pollution.
This environment consists of trees that are specially adapted to survive in the salty ocean waters that rise and fall with the tides.
People do not live in the mangrove forest itself, but since these forests exist just next to coastal areas, people live very close to them.
The roots of the trees in mangrove forests anchor the trees to the ground so that they do not get tossed around in the waves. Tropical coastal areas where the mangrove forests exist are often vulnerable to big storms like tsunamis, but since the storm has to pass through the mangrove forest first, the forests protect the coastline and the people that live there.
