Habitat Predictions: Can They Be Transferred To Other Oceans

What We Can't Sea

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As the world's oceans continue to warm, scientists are looking at how this will impact the habitats of marine life. This episode explores whether the predictions made for one ocean can be transferred to other oceans.

Seagrass beds are highly valued for their ecosystem services related to nutrient cycling and provisioning resources and habitat for other species. Globally, seagrass distributions have drastically declined leaving behind unvegetated but potentially suitable habitat. The effectiveness of seagrass conservation management such as safeguarding suitable habitats is often hampered by the lack of systematic documentation of historical seagrass distributions and by changes in environmental conditions in space or time. Another complication is that seagrass distributions in energetic environments like intertidal zones show local extinction-colonization dynamics which necessitates the identification and protection of vegetated and suitable unvegetated habitats.