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These seagrass meadows are highly productive habitats that provide many ecosystem services, including protecting the coast from storms and big waves, stabilising sediment, providing safe habitats for other species and encouraging biodiversity, enhancing water quality, and sequestering carbon and nutrients. [12] [3]
Found on seabeds from Alaska to Australia, seagrass meadows are one of the most widespread coastal habitats on Earth. ... “It’s important to think about restoration as an ongoing process; it ...
This seagrass is sensitive to light deprivation and a lowering of salinity in its environment. In a major flooding event in Queensland, half the seagrasses were lost in a shallow study area in Moreton Bay, the Syringodium isoetifolium disappearing almost completely while Zostera muelleri and other seagrass species survived, relatively unaffected. [4]
However, today seagrass meadows are being damaged by human activities such as pollution from land runoff, fishing boats that drag dredges or trawls across the meadows uprooting the grass, and overfishing which unbalances the ecosystem. Seagrass meadows are currently being destroyed at a rate of about two football fields every hour [citation ...
P. oceanica meadows play important roles in the maintenance of the geomorphology of Mediterranean coasts, which, among others, makes this seagrass a priority habitat of conservation. [40] Currently, the flowering and recruitment of P. oceanica seems to be more frequent than that expected in the past.
The leaves act as a trap and collect materials brought to the seagrass meadows. In turn this helps keep the ecosystem clear and clean of any material (Bjork, Mats, et al.). Unfortunately, much like other environments in the world, human development can alter the ecology of the sea grasses and therefore the coast of Florida is starting to lose ...
The meadows of the community occur as both monospecific meadows (of P. australis) or as multispecies meadows (with, for example, P. australis together with Zostera muelleri subsp. capricorni, Halophila ovalis). The macrophyte, Ruppia, may also be found growing within the ecological community (Creese et al., 2009).
Species and life-stage responses to patchiness and gradients in environmental structure are likely to be scale dependent, therefore, scale selection is an important task in any ecological study. Seascape ecology acknowledges that decisions made for scaling ecological studies influence our perspective and ultimately our understanding of ...