Sittee River is a river in

Belize Belize (; bzj, Bileez) is a Caribbean and Central American country on the northeastern 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 wate ...

. 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 in coastal saline or brackish water. The term is also used for tropical coastal vegetation consisting of such species. Mangroves are taxonomically diverse, as a result of convergent evolution in severa ...

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 tropical terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and the entire South American temperate zone. Definition In biogeo ...

. 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 flows and

sediment Sediment is a naturally occurring material that is broken down by processes of weathering and erosion, and is subsequently transported by the action of wind, water, or ice or by the force of gravity acting on the particles. For example, sa ...

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-2 ...

, and tidal flushing from the

Caribbean Sea The Caribbean Sea ( es, Mar Caribe; french: Mer des Caraïbes; ht, Lanmè Karayib; jam, Kiaribiyan Sii; nl, Caraïbische Zee; pap, Laman Karibe) is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere. It is bounded by Mexico ...

all support this tree growth. The forest at the mouth of the river is composed of three mangrove species: red mangrove (''

Rhizophora mangle ''Rhizophora mangle'', the red mangrove, is distributed in estuarine ecosystems throughout the tropics. Its viviparous "seeds", in actuality called propagules, become fully mature plants before dropping off the parent tree. These are disperse ...

''), white mangrove (''

Laguncularia racemosa ''Laguncularia racemosa'', the white mangrove, is a species of flowering plant in the leadwood tree family, Combretaceae. It is native to the coasts of western Africa from Senegal to Cameroon, the Atlantic Coast of the Americas from Bermuda an ...

''), 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 Category 4 hurricane 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, fif ...

caused significant flooding in the community. Located in Sittee River Village,

Serpon Sugar Mill Serpon Sugar Mill is an historical site in Belize, consisting of the remnants of a steam-powered sugar mill whose construction in 1865 marked the beginning of the country's industrial era. It is located near the village of Sittee River in the St ...

is the ruins of a 19th-century

sugar refinery A sugar refinery is a refinery which processes raw sugar from cane or beets into white refined sugar. Many cane sugar mills produce raw sugar, which is sugar that still contains molasses, giving it more colour (and impurities) than the w ...

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