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Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection

Seagrasses are in decline globally due to sustained pressure from coastal development, water quality declines and the ongoing threat from climate change. The result of this decline has been a change in coastal productivity, a reduction in critical fisheries habitat and increased erosion. Attempts to...

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Autores principales: Evans, Suzanna M., Griffin, Kingsley J., Blick, Ray A. J., Poore, Alistair G. B., Vergés, Adriana
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5889071/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29624579
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190370
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author Evans, Suzanna M.
Griffin, Kingsley J.
Blick, Ray A. J.
Poore, Alistair G. B.
Vergés, Adriana
author_facet Evans, Suzanna M.
Griffin, Kingsley J.
Blick, Ray A. J.
Poore, Alistair G. B.
Vergés, Adriana
author_sort Evans, Suzanna M.
collection PubMed
description Seagrasses are in decline globally due to sustained pressure from coastal development, water quality declines and the ongoing threat from climate change. The result of this decline has been a change in coastal productivity, a reduction in critical fisheries habitat and increased erosion. Attempts to slow this decline have included legislative protection of habitat and direct restoration efforts. Monitoring the success of these approaches requires tracking changes in the abundance of seagrasses, but such monitoring is frequently conducted at either too coarse a spatial scale, or too infrequently to adequately detect changes within individual meadows. Here, we used high resolution aerial imagery to quantify the change in meadows dominated by Posidonia australis over five years at 14 sites in five estuaries in south-eastern Australia. Australia has some of the world's most diverse and extensive seagrass meadows, but the widely distributed P. australis has a slow growth rate, recovers poorly after disturbance, and suffers runaway attrition if the conditions for recovery are not met. In 2010, after declines of 12–57% between the 1940s and 1980s, P. australis was listed as a threatened ecological community in New South Wales. We quantified changes in area at fine spatial scales and, where loss was observed, describe the general patterns of temporal decline within each meadow. Our results demonstrate that seagrass meadows dominated by P. australis underwent declines of ~ 2–40% total area at 11 out of 14 study sites between 2009 and 2014. In the iconic Sydney Harbour, our analyses suggest that P. australis meadows are declining at an average rate greater than 10% yr(-1), exceeding the global rate of seagrass decline. Highlighting these alarming declines across the study region should serve as means to prioritise management action and review the effectiveness of legislative listing as a method to limit impacts at an ecosystem level.
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spelling pubmed-58890712018-04-20 Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection Evans, Suzanna M. Griffin, Kingsley J. Blick, Ray A. J. Poore, Alistair G. B. Vergés, Adriana PLoS One Research Article Seagrasses are in decline globally due to sustained pressure from coastal development, water quality declines and the ongoing threat from climate change. The result of this decline has been a change in coastal productivity, a reduction in critical fisheries habitat and increased erosion. Attempts to slow this decline have included legislative protection of habitat and direct restoration efforts. Monitoring the success of these approaches requires tracking changes in the abundance of seagrasses, but such monitoring is frequently conducted at either too coarse a spatial scale, or too infrequently to adequately detect changes within individual meadows. Here, we used high resolution aerial imagery to quantify the change in meadows dominated by Posidonia australis over five years at 14 sites in five estuaries in south-eastern Australia. Australia has some of the world's most diverse and extensive seagrass meadows, but the widely distributed P. australis has a slow growth rate, recovers poorly after disturbance, and suffers runaway attrition if the conditions for recovery are not met. In 2010, after declines of 12–57% between the 1940s and 1980s, P. australis was listed as a threatened ecological community in New South Wales. We quantified changes in area at fine spatial scales and, where loss was observed, describe the general patterns of temporal decline within each meadow. Our results demonstrate that seagrass meadows dominated by P. australis underwent declines of ~ 2–40% total area at 11 out of 14 study sites between 2009 and 2014. In the iconic Sydney Harbour, our analyses suggest that P. australis meadows are declining at an average rate greater than 10% yr(-1), exceeding the global rate of seagrass decline. Highlighting these alarming declines across the study region should serve as means to prioritise management action and review the effectiveness of legislative listing as a method to limit impacts at an ecosystem level. Public Library of Science 2018-04-06 /pmc/articles/PMC5889071/ /pubmed/29624579 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190370 Text en © 2018 Evans et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Evans, Suzanna M.
Griffin, Kingsley J.
Blick, Ray A. J.
Poore, Alistair G. B.
Vergés, Adriana
Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection
title Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection
title_full Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection
title_fullStr Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection
title_full_unstemmed Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection
title_short Seagrass on the brink: Decline of threatened seagrass Posidonia australis continues following protection
title_sort seagrass on the brink: decline of threatened seagrass posidonia australis continues following protection
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5889071/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29624579
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190370
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