Regional series
14,236.73 ha in 2025
Each region's monitoring series for 2000, 2015, 2020 and 2025. Used for the home page totals, the comparison of the six regions and every 2000 → 2025 change.
Methods & data
How the atlas was made
Where every map, chart and figure on this site comes from, how each number is defined, and where the printed atlas disagrees with itself.
Sources
- Data owner
- National Center for Vegetation Cover Development and Combating Desertification (NCVC).
- Mangrove extent
- National mangrove database, mapped from SPOT 6 & 7 satellite imagery (2023).
- Change 2000–2025
- Change analysis of mangrove gain, loss and persistence using Landsat imagery for the early dates, Sentinel-2 for 2020 and SPOT 6/7 for 2025.
- Coastal habitats
- Coral reefs, seagrass and macroalgae, sediments and tidal flats from the JICA – NCWCD coastal habitat maps.
- Boundaries
- Provinces and governorates from the General Authority for Statistics.
- Text, photographs and figures
- The regional atlases, the introduction and the biodiversity atlas published by NCVC. Text is shown as printed; nothing has been rewritten or estimated.
How the figures are defined
The atlas reports mangrove area in three ways. They come from different steps of the work, so they differ slightly. The site always says which one a figure uses.
Mapped inventory
1,523.24 ha · Aseer
Some regions also publish an inventory of their latest mapping. Aseer's inventory is higher than its 2025 series value (1,425.77 ha); inventory figures are labelled as such wherever they appear.
National GIS database
14,240.73 ha · 2023
The sum of the mapped mangrove polygons in the NCVC database. The living map reads this database directly, so its totals are rounded from it.
Net change is always the 2025 value minus the 2000 value of the same series, and growth is that change divided by the 2000 value. An automated check recomputes these for every region before each release.
Maps on this site
Maps of mangroves, change and habitats are live maps of the national database drawn on satellite imagery, not pictures of the printed maps. Each one is framed on the governorates its printed counterpart covers. Change maps show three classes: stable (mangrove in 2000 and 2025), gain (new since 2000) and loss (present in 2000, gone by 2025).
The biodiversity distribution maps are shown as printed in the atlas, because the observation records behind them are not part of the database.
Fieldwork
Field teams surveyed mangrove stands in every region, recording tree height, regeneration, soil, salinity and aerial roots. The database lists these sites:
Where the sources differ
Where the printed atlas gives two different values for the same thing, the site shows both as printed and marks the place with a Source discrepancy note. It never chooses one silently.
- Eastern Region, 2000–2025 series. The text gives 712.37 ha (2000), 838.74 ha (2015) and 932.42 ha (2020), net +483.43 ha; the chart beside it gives 709.48, 835.34 and 928.64 ha, net +486.32 ha. Both end at 1,195.80 ha in 2025.
- Tabuk, coastal settings table. The table adds up to 4,825.9 ha against the 3,911.38 ha regional total in its own caption, and its percentage column repeats the hectares. The chart uses the values stated in the text (for example Island 3,445.70 ha, 88.09 %).
- Makkah, change matrix. Stable plus gain comes to 4,634.70 ha against the 4,635.43 ha regional value, a rounding difference of 0.73 ha.
Limits
- Satellite imagery changed in resolution over the period (30 m Landsat to 10 m Sentinel-2 to SPOT 6/7), so part of the measured gain can reflect better detection of narrow or small stands.
- Mapping is accurate to tens of metres; very small patches may be missed or merged.
- Absence of a species on a distribution map means it was not recorded there, not that it is absent.
- The satellite background comes from an external service and needs an internet connection.