Network Models Suggest Compensatory Responses of Mangrove Ecosystem to Extreme Climate Events

ABSTRACT Mangrove loss to extreme weather events is becoming increasingly prevalent, particularly in the tropics of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania. Predicting mangrove ecosystem responses to extreme climate events is difficult due to complex biotic and abiotic interactions. Using qualitative network models, we simulated the impacts of tropical storms, heatwaves, and floods on mangrove ecosystem components and their supported ecosystem services. We developed progressively more complex models incorporating biotic group disaggregation and sediment dynamics, based on literature‐derived interactions among trees, crabs, shrimp, birds, bivalves, fish, and sediment. Our analysis revealed distinct vulnerability patterns across components, with infaunal bivalves showing higher resilience than epifaunal bivalves, and mobile species exhibiting unexpected vulnerability despite dispersal ability. Crabs exhibited resilience during tropical storms despite the loss of trees. Carbon storage and coastal protection services showed strong coupling in their responses, while fisheries provision services showed modest negative responses. We developed a biodiversity balance index and revealed that heatwaves and floods triggered community structure imbalance. Complex models that had animal taxa disaggregation into more functional groups exposed important compensatory mechanisms, though at the cost of decreased model stability. This study demonstrates the utility of qualitative modeling in understanding ecosystem responses to climate extremes, which is particularly valuable in data‐limited contexts for informing conservation strategies.