What is it about?
Seagrass restoration is being used to halt and reverse worldwide seagrass losses. We show that seed-based restoration can have limited success due to biotic and abiotic environmental stressors, while transplant-based restoration shows promising results. Furthermore, we discovered a previously undescribed negative interaction between a leaf gluing ragworm and seagrass, which proved to be the best environmental predictor of transplant-based seagrass survival.
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Photo by Benjamin L. Jones on Unsplash
Why is it important?
As we are dependent on many services provided by coastal ecosystems, simple comparisons between success of restoration strategies can help management with effective restoration strategy selection through monitoring of environmental bottlenecks. The discovery of new negative interactions in degraded ecosystems, such as the leave-gluing by ragworms, shows the importance of healthy communities for coastal ecosystems.
Perspectives
We are intrigued by how restoration strategy selection should be location specific, with each location having their own environmental bottlenecks, and new ones to be discovered in an ever-changing underwater world.
Rens Cronau
Radboud Universiteit
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Seed‐ versus transplant‐based eelgrass (
Zostera marina
L.) restoration success in a temperate marine lake, Restoration Ecology, September 2022, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/rec.13786.
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