Ecosystem Management and Sustainable Infrastructure Resilience: Comparative Evaluation of Metallic Materials in Tropical Environments

Sustainable infrastructure resilience and ecosystem management in tropical coastal and wetland environments are increasingly central to sustainable development, environmental risk assessment, and long-term resource governance, particularly in regions affected by industrial activity, salinity intrusion, microbial dynamics, and climate-related stressors. However, many existing corrosion studies tend to isolate material performance or environmental chemistry, with limited integrated evidence on how interacting tropical ecosystems collectively influence infrastructure durability, material selection, and environmental risk mitigation. This study therefore evaluates the performance of selected engineering metals across contrasting tropical ecosystems and identifies material-selection priorities to support sustainable infrastructure planning in environmentally sensitive regions. Field investigations were conducted in four Niger Delta ecosystems in Nigeria (mangrove swamp, rainforest soil, riverine, and coastal marine environments) where 48 metal coupons of carbon steel, copper, zinc, and aluminum were exposed under natural conditions for 90 days. Assessments combined physicochemical and microbiological analyses with corrosion measurements using the weight-loss method. Data analysis involved corrosion-rate modelling, microbial quantification, descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, one-way and two-way ANOVA, Tukey’s post-hoc tests, and interaction-effect analysis using SPSS version 26. Findings indicate pronounced ecosystem-dependent variations in material degradation: copper demonstrated the highest resistance, with the lowest mean corrosion rate (0.083 mm/year), followed by aluminum (0.193 mm/year), while carbon steel exhibited the poorest performance (1.73 mm/year), reaching 2.31 mm/year in the coastal marine ecosystem. Statistical results confirmed significant effects of material type (F = 18.62; p < 0.001), ecosystem type (F = 24.91; p < 0.001), and their interaction (F = 6.43; p = 0.002), indicating that corrosion performance is jointly governed by material properties and environmental context. Correlation analysis identified chloride concentration (r = 0.84) and salinity (r = 0.81) as the strongest positive drivers of corrosion intensity, while copper presence showed a strong inverse relationship with microbial colonization (r = –0.77). Overall, the coastal marine and mangrove swamp ecosystems emerged as the most aggressive environments due to elevated salinity, chloride loading, organic matter, and sulfate-reducing bacterial activity. The study provides an evidence-based framework for ecosystem-sensitive material selection, environmental risk management, and sustainable infrastructure planning, while also supporting long-term asset resilience and informing future research on climate-adaptive infrastructure, ecosystem service protection, and sustainability-oriented environmental governance in vulnerable tropical regions.