In 2019, scientists set out to map the extent of seagrass in Seychelles, an island nation off the eastern coast of Africa. There, they hit upon a startling number: More than 90% of the country’s “blue carbon,” or the carbon stored in marine ecosystems, is contained within seagrass meadows. Under the Large-scale Seagrass Mapping and Management Initiative (LaSMMI), the seagrass mapping effort is now expanding to Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar, covering 2 million square kilometers (772,200 square miles) of seas hugging 9,500 km (5,900 mi) of coastline in the Western Indian Ocean. LaSMMI is a collaboration involving the Pew Charitable Trusts in the U.S., the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association based in Tanzania, the University of Southampton in the U.K. and regional research organizations in participating countries. “Currently, there is no standardized seagrass map for the [Western Indian Ocean] region, and the ecosystem is not widely included in management or policy,” Stacy Baez, a senior officer with Pew’s advancing coastal wetlands conservation campaign, told Mongabay by email. Baez added that less than a fifth of the world’s seagrasses are fully mapped. Seagrasses are not actually grasses but a group of flowering marine plants, with 72 known species, growing close to shorelines everywhere except in Antarctica. Like plants on land, seagrasses store carbon both as biomass and in the soil that they help bind. However, unlike their more glamorous marine cousins, mangroves and coral reefs, seagrasses are often overlooked in conservation efforts and carbon accounting. The team that mapped…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post From Kenya to Madagascar, massive effort aims to put seagrasses on the map first appeared on EnviroLink Network.
