Seagrasses once carpeted the seafloor of these coastal lagoons on the Eastern Shore
and in late nineteen twenties early nineteen thirty's the seagrasses were
affected by a pandemic disease. In 1933 a big storm hit the region and it
completely decimated the seagrasses so they became locally extinct. Seagrass provide many
important benefits to coastal ecosystems worldwide and the seagrass meadows, we've
discovered over the last say five years, are really important in removing carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere and being one of the possible solutions to global
warming
When I came here to UVA, the thought was that they couldn't live in this area because
since they weren't there to stabilize the seafloor the settlement would stir
up in the water column and block the light that they would need to grow. But
we had a graduate student who did some work and found out that in fact there was
enough light for the sea grass and that this area could possibly support them. We
decided we wanted to partner with someone from the Virginia Institute of
Marine Sciences and try to start seeding sea grass, and now almost 15 years later
we have very expansive, thriving seagrass meadows. Our data provide the
justification for restoring seagrass meadows globally.
There are a lot of opportunities for students from University of Virginia to
come here and be part of our research. -Working in the coastal zone is really
important because it is where the majority of humans live, it's where the majority
of cities are. -Every year we do this big annual synoptic survey where we go
out with a team of 15 to 20 people and we measure everything we can measure out
in the seagrass meadows. We monitor how seagrass is doing for years if
you want to study how long-term global change will affect those coastal
ecosystems you really have to get really long-term data sets. -The challenge is our seagrass systems
are being lost quite dramatically, we've lost a quarter of the world seagrass meadows
We know that seagrass meadows store twice the amount of carbon that a forrest
would store. Part of the urgency is not losing seagrass meadows and also
restoring seagrass meadows so that you have that ability to capture that carbon and
store it and bury it for centuries to millennia.