Global challenges for seagrass conservation

Abstract

Seagrasses, flowering marine plants that form underwater meadows, play a significant global role in supporting food security, mitigating climate change and supporting biodiversity. Although progress is being made to conserve seagrass meadows in select areas, most meadows remain under significant pressure resulting in a decline in meadow condition and loss of function. Effective management strategies need to be implemented to reverse seagrass loss and enhance their fundamental role in coastal ocean habitats. Here we propose that seagrass meadows globally face a series of significant common challenges that must be addressed from a multifaceted and interdisciplinary perspective in order to achieve global conservation of seagrass meadows. The six main global challenges to seagrass conservation are (1) a lack of awareness of what seagrasses are and a limited societal recognition of the importance of seagrasses in coastal systems; (2) the status of many seagrass meadows are unknown, and up-to-date information on status and condition is essential; (3) understanding threatening activities at local scales is required to target management actions accordingly; (4) expanding our understanding of interactions between the socio-economic and ecological elements of seagrass systems is essential to balance the needs of people and the planet; (5) seagrass research should be expanded to generate scientific inquiries that support conservation actions; (6) increased understanding of the linkages between seagrass and climate change is required to adapt conservation accordingly. We also explicitly outline a series of proposed policy actions that will enable the scientific and conservation community to rise to these challenges. We urge the seagrass conservation community to engage stakeholders from local resource users to international policy-makers to address the challenges outlined here, in order to secure the future of the world’s seagrass ecosystems and maintain the vital services which they supply. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s13280-018-1115-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorised users.

Warming enhances carbon dioxide and methane fluxes from Red Sea seagrass (<i>Halophila stipulacea</i>) sediments

“…Table 1 in Garcias-Bonet and . Provided estimates of their global extent of seagrass meadows ranging from a documented 326 000 km 2 (Unsworth et al, 2019) to a predicted 1.6 × 10 6 km 2 (Jayathilake and Costello, 2018), seagrass meadows may be important yet hitherto overlooked contributors to CH 4 emissions. Garcias-Bonet and reported that seagrasses could contribute to global CH 4 emissions by releasing CH 4 at a rate of 0.09 to 2.7 Tg yr −1 , which may increase the contribution of marine global emissions to previously reported global estimates by about 30 % (Garcias-Bonet and .…”

Habitat complexity influences the structure of food webs in Great Barrier Reef seagrass meadows

“…), and a greater understanding of how seagrasses provide these services is required to manage impacts on seagrass (Unsworth et al. ). In the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area (GBRWHA), seagrass is a key habitat supporting the outstanding universal values that led to its World Heritage status and is a critical habitat supporting fisheries production (Coles et al.…”

Using a Macroalgal Functional Form Approach to Assess the Level of Disturbance of Seagrass Meadows in Bahía of Nuevitas, Cuba (2000-2002)

“…Seagrass systems have been recognized as an important resource with its functions listed by [2] [3] [4] [5]. Similar to other marine ecosystems, seagrass meadows have diminished their coverage in part driven by warming sea surface temperatures but also by the direct effect of human intervention [6]. The most obvious anthropogenic-driven impacts on seagrasses occur in coastal areas adjacent to human settlements, where physical disturbance, organic enrichment, and overfishing activities result in the greatest negative impacts [7].…”