Very cool piece.
About five years ago, I was reading a piece about a project to restore the mangrove forests in New Orleans. Their approach had a similar feel to it, but the execution was very different.
They created seed bombs filled with seeds from multiple wetland plant species, highly saline soil and slow release fertilizers. They created hundreds of thousands of them and bombed the wetlands from a plane with the seed packets. They found this more closely resembled how mangrove forests conglomerate in nature and permitted natural selection amongst the species to happen as it should. I will see if I can find the link and post it here. Very cool stuff.
That's great. Mangroves are very underrated and it's nice to see they are getting more attention lately as natural barriers against these strong storms we are seeing. Those roots hold onto the soil/sand provide a lot of important habitat for various critters (and manatee food in Florida). I've heard of seed bombs in other settings (minus the saline soil, which may be unique for those trees), so maybe that can be an effective method sometimes.