Ramverk för storskalig, klimatanpassad ålgräsrestaurering för biologisk mångfald i kustekosystemen

The loss of habitats and biodiversity has accelerated in recent decades, worsened by climate change.

In response there have been international calls to develop methods and scale up the restoration of marine ecosystems to reverse negative trends.

Eelgrass meadows, hotspots for biodiversity, provide essential ecosystem services such as improving water quality and mitigating climate change through blue carbon accumulation.

Eelgrass is vanishing at an alarming rate and is predicted to disappear on large geographic scales due to climate change.In this transdisciplinary project, we take a holistic approach to address these challenges by developing and implementing new management and financial tools for scaling up restoration and protection of coastal habitats, using eelgrass meadows in Sweden as a model system.

Working closely with stakeholders, our interdisciplinary research team aims to (1) map eelgrass distribution, genetics and ecosystem services nationwide to identify valuable and vulnerable meadows for protection and restoration, (2) identify eelgrass resilient to climate change and assess whether transplantation of climate-adapted genotypes can save threatened populations in the Baltic Sea, (3) evaluate innovative large-scale restoration methods for eelgrass and assess costs and monetary value of produced ecosystem services, and (4) use these results to assess if sustainable financing can provide long-term funding for restoration and protection of coastal ecosystems.