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Sittee River is a river in
Belize Belize is a country on the north-eastern coast of Central America. It is bordered by Mexico to the north, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and Guatemala to the west and south. It also shares a maritime boundary with Honduras to the southeast. P ...
. It is also the name of a village along the river.


River

Located in central Belize, the
mangrove A mangrove is a shrub or tree that grows mainly in coastal saline water, saline or brackish water. Mangroves grow in an equatorial climate, typically along coastlines and tidal rivers. They have particular adaptations to take in extra oxygen a ...
s located at the mouth of this river are the tallest ever reported for the Caribbean region and among the tallest anywhere in the entire
Neotropical realm The Neotropical realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting Earth's land surface. Physically, it includes the tropics, tropical Ecoregion#Terrestrial, terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and the entire South American temperat ...
. The mouth of the Sittee River represents the optimal conditions for mangrove development and the forest found there has a high level of structural development.
Freshwater Fresh water or freshwater is any naturally occurring liquid or frozen water containing low concentrations of dissolved salts and other total dissolved solids. The term excludes seawater and brackish water, but it does include non-salty mi ...
flows and
sediment Sediment is a solid material that is transported to a new location where it is deposited. It occurs naturally and, through the processes of weathering and erosion, is broken down and subsequently sediment transport, transported by the action of ...
s carried by the river itself, draining from the
Maya Mountains The Maya Mountains are a mountain range located in Belize and eastern Guatemala, in Central America. Etymology The Maya Mountains were known as the ''Cockscomb'' or ''Coxcomb Mountains'' to Baymen and later Belizeans at least until the mid ...
, and tidal flushing from the
Caribbean Sea The Caribbean Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere, located south of the Gulf of Mexico and southwest of the Sargasso Sea. It is bounded by the Greater Antilles to the north from Cuba ...
all support this tree growth. The forest at the mouth of the river is composed of three mangrove species: red mangrove ('' Rhizophora mangle''), white mangrove (''
Laguncularia racemosa ''Laguncularia'' is a genus of plants in the family Combretaceae. The only species in the genus is ''Laguncularia racemosa'', the white mangrove. It is native to the coasts of western Africa from Senegal to Cameroon, the Atlantic Coast of the Am ...
''), and black mangrove (''
Avicennia germinans ''Avicennia germinans'', the black mangrove, is a shrub or small tree growing up to 12 meters (39 feet) in the acanthus family, Acanthaceae. It grows in tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas, on both the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts ...
'').


Village

Sittee River Village has a population of 312. In 2001, the arrival of
Hurricane Iris Hurricane Iris was a small, but powerful tropical cyclone that caused widespread destruction in Belize. Iris was the second-strongest storm of the 2001 Atlantic hurricane season, behind Hurricane Michelle. It was the ninth named storm, fift ...
caused significant flooding in the community. Located in Sittee River Village, Serpon Sugar Mill is the ruins of a 19th-century
sugar refinery A sugar refinery is a refinery which processes raw sugar from cane or sugar extracted from beets into white refined sugar. Cane sugar mills traditionally produce raw sugar, which is sugar that still contains molasses, giving it color ...
which has been designated a park. There is a small general store with camping and a community phone on the main village road.


References


Mangrove Forest Structure on the Sittee River, Belize, University of Maryland

Hurricane Iris Impact


External links


News & Event Exchange site
Rivers of Belize Stann Creek District {{Belize-river-stub