Discussions of valuable but threatened ocean ecosystems often focus on coral reefs or coastal mangrove forests.
Discussions of valuable but threatened ocean ecosystems often focus on coral reefs or coastal mangrove forests. Seagrass meadows get a lot less attention, even though they provide wide-ranging services to society and store lots of climate-warming carbon.
But the findings of a new University of Michigan-led study show that seagrass ecosystems deserve to be at the forefront of the global conservation agenda, according to the authors. It’s the first study to put a dollar value on the many services—from storm protection to fish habitat to carbon storage—provided by seagrasses across the Caribbean, and the numbers are impressive.
Using newly available satellite data, the researchers estimate that the Caribbean holds up to half the world’s seagrass meadows by surface area, and it contains about one-third of the carbon stored in seagrasses worldwide.
Read more at University of Michigan
Image: Caribbean seagrass off the coast of Abaco, the Bahamas, with several white grunt fish. (Image credit: Bridget Shayka via University of Michigan)
