Seagrasses are the world’s only marine flowering plants and are important for the ecosystem. They perform essential services such as sediment stabilization, water purification, nursery habitat for important fisheries species and carbon sequestration. However, like many marine habitats, seagrasses are threatened from human-induced stresses such as climate change, coastal development, and pollution.
To help seagrass, many marine scientists around the world have begun to monitor and/or restore seagrass meadows through various methods and techniques. Unlike other marine ecosystems such as coral reefs or mangroves that have been researched for many years, we are only just beginning to understand seagrass health and what methods are the most effective for restoration. Expanding our knowledge can help to improve success in management and restoration efforts.
One area that we are still lacking significant understanding in is how seagrass reproduce. Seagrass can reproduce asexually, through genetically identical clones, and can cover large areas with only one single individual. However, this can pose a threat to the seagrass as a lack of genetic diversity can make the seagrass more vulnerable to stress events such as disease outbreaks or overgrazing. Having an increase in genetic diversity in seagrass meadows improves the chances that a single stressor will not decimate a whole population. Increasing genetic diversity can only be done through sexual reproduction.
However, the scientific community still lacks significant understanding of seagrass sexual reproduction. Seagrass, like land plants, reproduce through pollination and depending on the species, may flower only in rare occasions. Additionally, these flowering events may not last for very long, making windows for data or seed collection slim. Therefore, many surveys may miss flowering events and fail to observe sexual reproduction in seagrass meadows. This has left us with very little photographic and scientific information regarding the flowering, fruiting, and seeding of many seagrass species around the world. To help expand our knowledge of such events, we created SEAFLORA (SEAgrass FLowering Observation Recording Archive) to have a central place in which to share such information to the global seagrass community.
SEAFLORA (SEAgrass FLowering Observation Recording Archive) is a global, open-sourced database created for monitoring sexual reproduction in seagrass. It was developed to gather seagrass flowering and seeding event observations from marine practitioners, scientists, and citizen scientists to expand our understanding of seagrass reproduction. The gathered data will be used to analyse patterns in the timing of events, the conditions that may trigger flowering events, the potential related health aspects of the seagrass, and how these reproductive events may be changing with climate change and other stressors. This data may then be useful not only for the seagrass scientific community but also for restoration efforts so that we can have a better understanding of when to gather seeds. This database will also serve as an archive for photographs taken of different reproductive structures, helping to further our understanding of the morphology of different species across geographies and time.
Since beginning, we have joined forces with SeagrassSpotter, a citizen science database for seagrass monitoring and observations. Thousands of users all around the world input their seagrass monitoring data to help spread knowledge on our ocean’s only marine flowering plant. You can upload your flowering observations directly on their site along with other survey data by going to www.seagrassspotter.org and registering!
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Photo Credit - Michael Sweet