Between 1990 and 2023, the island lost around 6 hectares of dense vegetation, a net loss of almost a fifth of what existed. The number comes from Google Earth Engine, validated by NDVI and by a supervised classification that isolated the mangrove from the rest. But the most revealing finding is not the total. It is where the loss occurred: at the coastal edges, while the interior gained vegetation. Native mangrove retreating on one side, urban green advancing on the other. The ecosystem did not simply disappear — it was replaced.
And yet there is a whole layer of loss that the satellite cannot reach. Where there was mangrove there was also the sound of the shellfish gatherers, the conversations at dawn, the smell of the sea, the sound of roots moving through the mud at the tide. The degradation of an ecosystem is never only ecological. It is also acoustic, social, made of the lives that depended on that green now absent from the map.
I think of this when I look at the vegetation indices on the screen. NDVI measures what reflects light, and it does so very well. What fell silent after the mangrove retreated is precisely what the science I want to do still needs to learn to measure.