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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]
There are about 72 species of sea grass around the world, and while they cover about .1% of the seafloor, they play an important role in maintaining a healthy ocean.
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 ...
Few species were originally considered to feed directly on seagrass leaves (partly because of their low nutritional content), but scientific reviews and improved working methods have shown that seagrass herbivory is an important link in the food chain, feeding hundreds of species, including green turtles, dugongs, manatees, fish, geese, swans ...
Seagrass meadows provide homes for young fish and protected creatures such as seahorses and stalked jellyfish.
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]
The western coast contain notable and diverse seagrass beds; Cockburn Sound and the Swan River estuary, and the Houtman Abrolhos, Rottnest and other islands. The Wooramel Seagrass Bank 12 species - estimated 4,500 km 2 of seabed - at Shark Bay is the largest reported seagrass meadows in the world (Walker, 1989).
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).