Seagrasses, often referred to as the “lungs of the sea,” are vital to marine ecosystems. They provide habitat for countless marine species, store significant amounts of carbon, and help stabilize the seabed. However, these underwater meadows are declining globally due to human activities, prompting urgent efforts to restore them. Scientists from Project Seagrass and Swansea University have outlined ten rules for effective seagrass restoration. Each rule plays a crucial role in ensuring the success of these initiatives, offering a strategic framework for restoring these invaluable ecosystems.

1. Protect Existing Seagrass First

Given the increasing interest in seagrass restoration, the authors emphasize that it is significantly more challenging, time-consuming, and costly to re-establish seagrass meadows than to protect those already existing. Protecting these meadows from local stressors, such as improving water quality, reducing boating damage, establishing Marine Protected Areas, and promoting sustainable livelihoods, is essential. The authors also highlight the importance of prioritizing which seagrass meadows to protect, considering future climate changes, such as temperature shifts, sea-level rise, and changes in land use.

2. Work Together

The restoration of seagrass meadows is a collaborative effort that requires the involvement of diverse stakeholders, expertise, and experiences at every stage of the process. Seagrass ecosystems support various uses and livelihoods, from fishing to recreation, and maintaining equality and rights is crucial. Engaging local communities and stakeholders during site selection is essential, as they often become the long-term stewards of the restoration sites. Without collaboration, large-scale seagrass restoration is unachievable, and co-designing projects with communities enhances the social value of restored habitats.

3. Create Biodiverse Ecosystems with Multiple Functions for People and Planet

The primary goal of seagrass restoration is to maximize the biomass and biodiversity of meadows, ensuring they support diverse and resilient ecosystem functions and services. Natural systems provide multiple interconnected services, and focusing narrowly on a few can lead to unfavorable shifts and stakeholder conflicts. For example, the unregulated conservation of seagrass-associated green turtles may harm seagrass, affecting fisheries and other services. The complexity of seagrass ecosystems means that restoration should consider multiple services rather than focusing on a few in isolation.

4. Select Appropriate Sites for Restoration

A thorough site selection process is critical for successful seagrass restoration. Objectives should include restoration needs, habitat area, intended benefits, and beneficiaries. Habitat suitability modeling can help identify potential sites, but environmental factors like sediment movement, hydrodynamics, and light availability, as well as biological factors such as the presence of bioturbators, algae, and grazers, must also be considered. Social attitudes, opportunities, and costs are equally important when selecting restoration sites, as seagrass restoration is not just a biological process but a socio-ecological one.

5. Determine Appropriate Restoration Methods

While there is guidance on seagrass planting techniques, a universal set of guidelines for restoration success is still lacking. Given the high costs and uncertainties of planting methods, indirect approaches that remove pressures and encourage natural recovery may often be more effective. For instance, replacing traditional boat moorings with environmentally friendly alternatives can reduce seabed damage and support seagrass recovery, as seen in the UK.

6. Use Resilient Plant Materials and Future-Proof Your Project

The long-term cost-effectiveness of planting new habitats for species that may soon disappear is a key consideration. Climate-driven range shifts for seagrass species are already occurring, with significant northward migrations projected in places like the US East Coast. Climate stressors affect seagrass differently at various life stages and times of the year, impacting seed viability and survival. Practitioners must integrate climate projections into restoration plans, adapting methods based on long-term forecasts, such as El Niño intensity and sea-level rise, to ensure future success.

7. Maximize the Potential Opportunity of the Restoration

Maximizing resources is crucial for successful seagrass restoration, focusing on enhancing ecological benefits. Seagrass meadows exist in various landscape patterns, with fragmented meadows being more vulnerable to environmental change than continuous ones. Restoration efforts that reconnect fragmented patches can boost coastal seascape resilience. Techniques like stimulating natural regeneration and modifying sediment conditions have shown success in places like the Florida Keys. Restoration should consider biodiversity at all levels, as it enhances system resilience. The concept of seascape-scale restoration emphasizes connectivity between habitats, which is vital for improving ecosystem function and resilience, particularly in temperate systems. Targeted research is needed to understand and enhance habitat connectivity, contributing to more effective marine ecological restoration efforts.

8. Plan Ahead for Infrastructure, Capacity, and Restoration Material

Planning before starting restoration projects is essential to reduce risks. Decisions about sites and methods should be based on sound science, local data, and existing literature. Besides selecting the right biological conditions, ensuring the appropriate social governance structure is vital for community buy-in. Developing strong community relationships, as illustrated by projects in South West Wales, can determine the success or failure of restoration efforts. Flexible project management, risk assessment, and preparation for potential setbacks are crucial for long-term success.

9. Develop Realistic Informed Goals and Reporting

As global environmental policy increasingly embraces Nature-Based Solutions, clear communication about the effectiveness and uncertainties of seagrass restoration is more important than ever. The authors advocate for a “learn by doing” approach, where the wider restoration community can benefit from shared experiences and lessons learned from both successes and failures.

10. Make It Pay

Seagrass restoration is expensive and has primarily been funded by philanthropic and government sources. New financial mechanisms are needed to support seagrass protection and enhancement, which is crucial for successful restoration. While funding is easier to obtain for planting new areas, innovative financing solutions are necessary to sustain long-term restoration efforts, including monitoring, management, and stewardship to ensure success.

Wider Impact

Restoring seagrass meadows is an intricate process that requires a strategic, well-informed approach. By following these ten golden rules, restoration projects can enhance their chances of success, ensuring that seagrass meadows continue to provide their vital ecological functions for generations to come. As we face growing environmental challenges, the restoration of seagrass meadows is needed to increase the resilience of our oceans.

Seagrass restoration is not just about planting underwater plants; it’s about restoring balance to our marine ecosystems and ensuring a healthier planet for future generations. Each of these rules provides a piece of the puzzle, collectively guiding us towards more effective and sustainable restoration efforts. Implementing the 10 Golden Rules for seagrass restoration can help shift the focus from merely planting to facilitating natural recovery and sustaining restoration over the long term.

For more information: Plants, People, Planet.

The post 10 Rules for Seagrass Restoration appeared first on Rewilding Academy.

Scientists now understand that without biodiversity ecosystems lose their resilience and potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere at the rates required to keep inside the 1.5 °C warming limit, both in the ocean and on land. Whales are crucial allies in the battle against climate change.

It is critical that a market-ready whale credit system and the required policy be developed in order to encourage global whale monitoring and conservation. Data on whales and the ocean, scientific investigation, monitoring technology, and cooperation among ocean stakeholders are all necessary for determining the value of whale ecosystem services and developing a market solution.

The distinctive contribution of Whale Seeker is to develop ethical AI and visual remote sensing technologies that can monitor whale presence and prevent harm from companies that share the whales’ ocean environment. With the help of this technology, business operational procedures and standards will be more accountable and verifiable.

Whale Seeker™ is leading this project in the Canadian Arctic, to develop and test a scalable whale carbon and biodiversity detection methodology and credit system to incentivize all marine actors to monitor marine mammal presence and take meaningful action to avoid conflict with them. By basing our methodology on images, we are both providing an auditable quantitative measure of marine mammals and firm metrics to aid in ESG reporting. The pilot project will focus on narwhals (Monodon monoceros), using existing scientific data collected over 10 years to model and verify whale services, while also bringing in new and existing aerial imagery and satellite technology to measure whale abundance in relation to ocean productivity and health. With these advances in science and technology, along with other test cases around the globe to address other whale threats such as entanglements, we aim to deliver verified carbon/biodiversity credits to marine industries in the next two years.

“Our current economic paradigm values dead whales that are sold for their meat. In contrast, living whales are valued at zero dollars although their ecological services, including carbon sequestration, are incredibly valuable to our own survival and well-being as well as to the health of our ocean. We need a new economic paradigm that recognizes and values the services of a living and thriving nature, both flora and fauna. This new nature-positive economy will lead to sustainable and shared prosperity for all” … says Ralph Chami, Assistant Director at the IMF.

“Increasing the world’s whale populations is a win-win strategy to capture more carbon from the atmosphere and improve ocean health. However, for whale protection measures to be adopted on a global scale, we need to incentivize businesses and other stakeholders by proving the benefits of protecting whales far exceed the cost. By using ethical AI we aim to set not only a high technical standard for whale detection but also an ethical one.”, adds Emily Charry-Tissier, CEO and Co-Founder of Whale Seeker.

“For centuries people have used the latest technologies to hunt down and kill whales,” says Ed Goodall, from project board member WDC, Whale and Dolphin Conservation. “It is a measure of just how far we have come from those dark days that we are now using the latest technology to hunt down and save them. Whales play an outsized role in the marine ecosystem and carbon capture, but these ‘services’ have not fully recognised or valued before. We are now in a race against time to build the evidence base, and secure the finance needed to help whale populations recover, and we are delighted to be working with Whale Seeker on this exciting, cutting-edge project.”

This project will develop scalable, replicable methodology and market solutions for marine mammal health and ocean protection on a worldwide scale. The status of the whale populations around the world is a powerful tool for reducing climate change and a clear sign of the health of the oceans.

Source

The post How whales help fight climate change appeared first on Rewilding Academy.