This ocean place will help protect the planet, but we need to do something to help it

0:00 Coastal ecosystem health is extremely important in protecting the ocean, and one of those coastal ecosystems is seagrass. It supports fisheries, stores carbon and protects coastlines. But we still cannot agree on how to measure whether it is healthy or disappearing. If we can't measure it properly, how can we protect it at all? We're gonna be diving into the ways of measuring why it's so important to have one way or just two or three ways of measuring and keeping that consistent around the world so we can properly identify whether it's trending upwards or downwards. On this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, let's start the show. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, Marine biologist and science communicator here to tell you what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action.

0:48 On today's episode, we're gonna be talking about seagrass, but we're going back into the ways of measuring. We talked about eDNA last week. Today we're gonna be talking about ways of measuring seagrass, but in a way where it's actually consistent across all seagrass habitats, and we're gonna talk about why that's so important in their protection. But first, before we get into that, let's talk about what seagrasses are. They are a plant, an aquatic plant that goes underwater that is a vitally important coastal habitat to not only biodiversity, but fisheries, production, water quality, and carbon storage. It matters because without these habitats, we lose a vital habitat that will protect the ocean. These areas of biodiversity, of fisheries production, of better water quality, of carbon storage, these are areas that are gonna help us in just being with the ocean and making sure that it's stable, making sure that we reduce climate change, making sure that we can eat from it, making sure that we can have a lot of biodiversity, like I said, to keep it stable.

1:43 So this is how we protect the ocean. However, there are certain habitats that get a little bit more attention than others. And you can argue that seagrasses take a backseat to, I don't know, a habitat like coral reefs maybe. And look, coral reefs are very important as well. They're extremely abundant in certain places, or they used to be. And they were a huge tourist attraction for a lot of people, a lot of countries. They provide a lot of fish. They provide a lot of diversity. However, they are very, very narrow in terms of their ability to stand change. And so when change happens, like you see in the ocean right now with very different and varying temperatures, we're seeing different PHs and varying PHs, coral habitats tend to kind of go wonky and tend to bleach or die off, and we're seeing that a lot.

2:29 And without these habitats that are around it to help supply them with the biodiversity that's needed with the animals that are needed to help these coral reefs thrive. Because with coral reefs, if you get algae that grow over the corals, you're not gonna get many corals. It'll suffocate the corals. The corals won't get the light that they need to use to photosynthesize and be able to build their skeleton over and over and over again. I would go into the science, but we're not talking about coral reefs. We're talking about seagrasses. So if algae overgrow corals, and the fish that are eat the algae aren't there, then we're not gonna have many corals around. The fish that eat the algae, a lot of the times they're juvenile or smaller little sections or life history cycles are usually being protected in seagrass habitats and the biology exchange between corals and seagrasses and even mangroves and other coastal habitat is extremely important when we see that.

3:14 Also, there are salt marshes in more temperate areas. There's mudflats. These are all in very important coastal habitats. But today we're gonna be focusing in on seagrasses. Like I said before, the amount of services that seagrass provides are extremely important. Without seagrasses, we have crappy water quality. We have less fish, and we have less biodiversity, and we have less carbon storage. The amount of carbon that seagrasses will absorb is four to 10 times more than a tree on land. That's how important these meadows are. That's how important these plants are to our oceans for a number of different reasons, but even just for climate change in itself. The way that we protect these places is not just to restore them once they're gone, but it's to protect them when they're there.

3:58 And to be able to protect them, we have to know what is there. We have to be able to measure them properly and be able to protect 'em across all different places within that nation, within a coastline or even in different nations internationally. We have to be able to measure them the same way. And that's what the focus of this episode is on is measuring consistently across habitats like for seagrass habitats across coastlines, across national borders and international borders. These are such something that's extremely important to measure properly. seagrass Montes, it varies widely and it really happens based on the people that are around, the expertise that they have, the money that they have, and the ability to get out into the ocean. The ocean can be a very dangerous place.

4:39 Luckily, a lot of these places are on the coast, but still can be very dangerous to get out to certain places. Some of them are very remote and it could be dangerous to get out there. Some of 'em are very expensive to get out there. So that varies depending on the geography, depending on the country, if they have the money to go out and do this, or even just the funding that's available to them to go out and do this type of work. Now when you have countries that are doing different methods, and we'll talk about the methods in a second, we will have differing ways of like accuracy. We're gonna have different ways of biases. So every method will have different biases. Let's get into some of those methods. So we have quadrat-based field surveys, which is basically a square that's put down of, usually it's like a PVC pipe in a square. It's put down all over the seagrass, and then you count the number of plants that are in that seagrass.

5:21 Sometimes you can count the species. So the quadrat sizes can vary widely. The cover estimates may be continuous percentages or bin categories, such as like different methods and different scores, which can be inconsistent across these different scores. The observer that's judging them can be very different. And some surveys will record species level cover and others will just do total cover. So the, data that's done through these quadrat-based field surveys are not done consistently. Then you have photoquadrats, which is basically you have a photo. You, decipher a quadrat or video transact, and then you decipher a quadrat. And then you count what's ever in there. Now sometimes the image resolution and camera angle can vary, so that makes it a little different. Different annotation methods are used, so, such as point counts or pixel classification or broadbands, which even though they're digital, it makes it very inconsistent across the methods.

6:09 Understory or rare species are often missed in this type of way. And so, we have remote sensing from satellites or drones, which can be very expensive. Again, you're looking at different centers have different potentials for spatial and spectral resolutions. Classifications, algorithms are very widely. And so there's a lot of problems. We just have field-based parameters or mapping with GPS. It's just there's so many different ways of identifying things and it can be very inconsistent across different, you know, labs that are doing the work, the nonprofit organizations are doing the work. Sometimes you're doing it through a citizen conservation project, the Citizen Science Conservation Project. So, the people who are identifying the species or the total cover have different methodologies of doing things or may not do it perfectly.

6:50 And so that becomes a problem when we're starting to look at how we are judging the health of seagrasses across the world. Not only in one section of One nation, one region, one nation, but also across nations. So it can be very difficult. Now the thing is, is seagrasses have become an Essential Ocean Variable, an EOV. So what does that mean? We are gonna go into it because it's something that's really, really important. So an Essential Ocean Variable or an EOV is a small, carefully chosen set of ocean measurements that scientists agree are the most important things we need to measure consistently to understand how the ocean is changing and support decision making. So once we start to see how these seagrass meadows are changing over time, we can actually put in place management decisions or policies to actually help out this.

7:37 Now why was this important, or why was seagrasses designated as an EOV? Well, it does two things. One, it's critically important for society and ecosystems. And two, it is feasible to observe repeatedly at large scales using existing methods. So that's a pretty good reason to have them there. So the big thing is, is they're comparable, they're repeatable, and it's usable data. That's the big thing why EOVs are so important. Now, here's the thing. They identified three core measurements that will be good to measure across nations and across seagrass Meadows. There's seagrass aerial extent where seagrass exists and how much area it covers. Seagrass percentage cover how dense or sparse the seagrass is in on the sea floor. Seagrass species composition, which species are present, and why it matters for the resilience and ecosystem services.

8:24 So some species are a little bit more resilient than others, so if there is ones that are not resilient that are present, and it's only those, then maybe that needs a little bit more protection than the ones that are a little bit more resilient. So together, these give a proper picture of what the seagrass is in and how it's doing. So if you have the looking at the aerial extent, you're looking at how much it covers. Well, if you look at the actual, like the space that it covers, that's a huge indicator of like, if it grows, that means it's doing well. If it starts to shrink, that's means it's not doing well. When you have the percent cover, you're looking at the patchiness within the seagrass meadow. If it starts to become patchy within there, meaning that it's starting to get sparse within the area. There's something going on within the area that's either eating the seagrass or it's, really degradating it inside.

9:05 So that's something that we have to look at. And of course, species composition, what seagrass species is present. That's really an important aspect. I just mentioned it. If it's more resilient or less resilient, it's something that's very important for you. It whether it will continue to provide ecosystem services on the long term. So once you have the standardized method and understanding that these are the three methods that we can use, you're able to look at how management decisions will help these seagrass meadows, right? Because we're looking at, well, we want this thing to grow an aerial extent, or we want it to be very dense within that area. 'cause that'll provide more biodiversity. We want these species to be protected depending on what's present. Obviously the more diverse, the better. But we need to make sure that these are all looked at from a policy level and it's easy to measure and assess their health.

9:50 When we have this type of data across all different types of sea meadows and habitats and regions and countries, we start to get a better understanding of health overall. If everything is measured differently and we can't really compare, it's like apples to oranges. It's not good. You need apples to apples or oranges to oranges, then you'll be able to say, comparing to this area. This one's doing really well or not doing really well. And if we see, look at ones in France, well, if we actually did some work in here, we can really rebuild it and it can be really great. I'm just using France as an example. Nothing bad with France. I'm sure there's some ones that are doing really well, Meadows and some that need to be restored. The way we measure seagrass is not just important for international frameworks or for policies, but it's important for scientists to be able to compare how the seagrass is doing within their study area compared to how seagrass is doing outside.

10:36 That's the really, the big thing when it comes to it. We can actually compare to see what different disturbances are causing growth or causing a reduction in seagrass cover, species composition and so forth. Now here's the thing. As we start to get better with technology, satellites, drones, AI, and machine learning, these technologies are really gonna help us with monitoring. So for instance, there is a project out in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef that actually helps monitor using AI, like, how well and how much cover there is in specific photographs of the Great Barrier Reef. So essentially it's a citizen science program. You can go on the website, I'll put the link in the show notes. You can go on a website.

11:17 You sign up for an account And then you can do like four or five in a row in like 10 minutes, not even. And what the AI does is demarcates an area was like, I think this has coral cover. And then you say, what type of coral cover? It's a boulder, whether it's like a flat like plate coral or whether it's a branching coral. And then that data goes to someone else. That picture gets looked at five times by five different people. And then they look at what the results are. It goes to a great barrier Reef Monitoring program where people can look at more data. 'cause that's really what it comes down to. You need more data that's standardized that we can do it. And even though it doesn't provide accurate, like to the centimeter kind of data, it provides really good data to make better management decisions on. And that's really what it comes down to. Sometimes, the most accurate data or the best resolution is not the best thing to do for management of seagrasses across a country or a nation or internationally.

12:05 So what we need next is we need broader acceptance or adoption of these shared monitoring standards. This paper that I'm talking about today that this whole thing is based on really calls for that adoption of these shared monitoring standards. So hopefully there's incentives for open data sharing, which is gonna be really important when we're able to standardize these methodologies and more people can use them. These are easier things to measure than a lot of other things that have been used before. And you can see a little bit more collaboration between researchers, managers, and policy makers. One of the reasons why I do this podcast is because I can take research that's being done in a research papers that are behind paywalls. This one was freely available, which is great. Most of them are behind paywalls because it's really hard to get them outta paywalls.

12:46 You have to pay a lot of money and that the researchers don't have. And so managers don't get access to these papers and don't get access to something as important as standardizing methods so they can make better management decisions for managers. I've done episodes on this before, the crazy thing about peer reviewed papers and journal articles is they're not available for everybody. They're not very inclusive. They're actually very exclusive. So really what it comes down to is like if we want to protect habitats, we need to make sure that we are all measuring it the same way. They may not be the best measurements, they may not give you the UpToDate and most experienced way of looking at how to protect seagrasses. But what they do is they give us a base and they give us enough information for people to make management decisions and compare and contrast different seagrass Meadows around the world.

13:27 And that's what's really needed right now. We don't know a lot about seagrasses. We have very little knowledge on the extent of seagrasses around the world. And there's programs like SeagrassSpotter where people can measure their own seagrasses and the extent and everything and put it into a database and it goes into a map where people could get more information on that. It's just a great citizens science project that's put on by my friends over at the seagrass project. But we need more of that. We need standardized data to make sure that everything is done properly. And so without this type of measuring, without these standards, we are not in good shape to protect seagrasses around the world. And so this is a foundational step towards protecting coastal ecosystems for coastal ecosystem health. It's really, really important.

14:08 So what I would like to encourage is listeners to see monitoring and data as part of conservation action. If you're able to fund small organizations or large organizations that do this type of work, that do restoration, that do monitoring, this is really important. The Seagrass Project is a great organization that does a lot of restoration, that does a lot of monitoring, and they also test instruments to help with monitoring, to help with seed propagation and all that kinda stuff. It is so, so important to help these organizations like Seagrass Project. I'll put a link to the show notes with for them, and that will be really important to be able to support groups like that and seagrass organizations like that because seagrass is, like I said at the beginning, are important for a lot of different things.

14:49 Biodiversity support, fish production, carbon sequestration, and of course water quality control. So that's very, very important. So, that's it for today's episode. I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the ocean Podcast. If you wanna subscribe or follow, you could do so on YouTube. I'd love to hear your comments if you wanna put a comment on YouTube. Also, if you want to leave a comment, you're listening to an audio, go to speak up for blue.com/feedback. I'd love to hear what you think. And of course you can always catch me on the next episode of the How to Protect the ocean Podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the True nor Strong and free. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.