The Ocean Foundation is proud to bring you ...
Just One Acre of Seagrass (43,560 square
feet)
- Provides food and hiding places for fish, seahorses, manatees, and other animals – in fact, approximately 70% of all marine life in the ocean is directly dependent upon seagrass
- Seagrass also traps sediments to the ocean floor, reducing sedimentation in the water column (turbidity), which is a leading killer of coral reefs
- Helps control nutrients (excess fertilizer and sewage): Absorbs 6.4 pounds (2.9 kg) of nutrients per year, equivalent to the treated effluent from 490 people.
- Helps address climate change: Sequesters 7.401 metric tons of carbon per year, equivalent to the CO2 emissions from an automobile traveling 3,860 miles.
- These ecosystem services are worth US$18,000 per year per acre. Seagrass also supports Florida's $184,000,000,000 a year commercial fishing industry, which equates to an additional $62,000 per acre per year.
Seagrass meadows are
disappearing and so too, are the services they
provide to other animals in the sea.
Certainly, declines far exceed reported
increases. The best estimate is that we
have lost over 25 percent of seagrass meadow
coverage in the ocean in the last four
decades. The losses continue on a daily
basis due to the many threats faced by
seagrass. One threat is physical
damage from boat props, anchors, and vessel
groundings that rip seagrass from the substrate
and leave a scar that is vulnerable to further
erosion and, left unchecked, can eventually
destroy the whole seagrass bed.
To address this threat, The Ocean Foundation will use the restoration techniques available from Seagrass Recovery to re-plant and re-seed to restore these scars in the seagrass meadows. We invite you to join us in restoring seagrass meadows in Florida, New York, California, and Washington.
Biodegradable Sediment Tubes will be placed inside the scars, halting expansion of the damage and allowing seagrass to re-colonize over the injury.