Seagrass beds are an important natural resource in the northern gulf of mexico providing ecosystem services such as indirectly supporting commercial fishing landings, protecting shorelines from…

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration awarded $363,243 under the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Science, Observation, Monitoring, and Technology program to the University of New Orleans from September 2021 to August 2023. Through this cooperative agreement, the University of New Orleans will develop a plan to assist in restoring seagrass beds in the Pensacola and Perdido Bays region for increased resilience to climate stress. An interdisciplinary team of researchers and managers will co-produce the plan, which will be informed by expert advisory input, a literature review on genetic variation and resilience, existing data on bed health, and knowledge shared at a planned seagrass restoration workshop. The resulting plan and subsequent reports are intended to guide best practices for selecting restoration sites, transplant density and acreage, assessing stressors, testing the diversity-resilience hypothesis, and gaining stakeholder support, with the goal of successful restoration by 2025.

Seagrass beds are an important natural resource in the northern gulf of mexico providing ecosystem services such as indirectly supporting commercial fishing landings, protecting shorelines from storm surge and land loss, and sequestering carbon to buffer climate change. These services are threatened by natural (HURRICANES) and human disturbances (e.g., storm runoff, dredging) which act to remove plants and lower water quality leading to declines in seagrass surface coverage and bed health. Changes in water quality driven by global climate change will exacerbate bed degradation. Managers of seagrass systems are therefore turning to restoration for mitigation, but the success of these efforts are often unpredictable. The managers of pensacola and perdido bays estuary program are faced with this challenging task. They must decide the approach to take for bed restoration knowing the habitats within the semi-enclosed bays experience amplified summer temperatures and receive excessive riverine inputs resulting from increased frequency and intensity of storms. Failure in restoration is often attributed to disturbances, such as these, that are difficult to locally remove or reduce. Thus, there is a need to increase the stress threshold of restored beds for longterm stability. One potential avenue, seldomly considered in restoration, is to assess the genotypic diversity of existing beds and their resiliency to environmental stress. Greater standing genetic diversity within a population is hypothesized to be beneficial for stability (i.e., diversity-resiliency hypothesis) because IT increases the probability that resistant genotypes are present when faced with new stressors. The goal of this proposal is to reduce unknowns for restoration success by focusing on the benefits and inclusion of genetic variation. Specifically, the proposed project will devise a plan to assist in the management decision on how to restore seagrass beds in the pensacola and perdido BAY for resiliency to climate stress. To ensure the plan is actionable, the scope will be CO-produced by an interdisciplinary team composed of researchers and managers. IT will be refined for wide scale applicability using outcomes from a survey of managers restoration needs and history. Steps in the plan will be informed by (1) the advisory role of the gulf of mexico seagrass community of practice (COP) and state managers (2) a literature review of genotypic variation and resiliency, (3) data compilation of bed health, and (4) shared knowledge gathered from a planned seagrass restoration workshop. Steps in the plan are envisioned to include proper site selection, intended density and acreage of planting, assessment of stressors, experimental testing of the diversity- resiliency hypothesis, assessments of genotypic variation and productivity, and a strategy to gain the support of stakeholders. The process will result in reports, publications, and annotations added to the comprehensive conservation and management plan and the COP searchable online database. Implementation will pinpoint areas of high conservation priority, sources for transplants, genotypic composition to increase stress thresholds, give emphasis and applicability of molecular tools for monitoring, and ultimately lead to successful restoration in 2025 to guide best restoration practices.