Seagrass restoration is a collective effort! Last Monday, we had the privilege of hosting the Seagrass Community of Practice 2025 at Wageningen University. Together with Witteveen+Bos, we designed a program focused on knowledge exchange and collaboration. With 65 experts from academia, consultancy, government, and NGOs, we explored the latest insights and best practices in seagrass restoration.
Lina Mtwana Nordlund about our new letter in PNAS: “Seagrasses are really cool, they can reduce the abundance of bacterial pathogens from the water. This is great for seaweed farming BUT can be quite harmful for the seagrass!”
Can coastal ecosystem recovery outpace the impacts of coastal development? 🌊 Our blue carbon workshop in #Curaçao explored this question. A week packed with in-water research, on-site discussions with experts from Curaçao and Bonaire, and quality time to reflect on future work with colleagues Céline, Mischa, and Mandy. We:
How to strengthen coastal #resilience in Kenya? —this was the focus of last week’s workshop in Tiwi, where around 35 of us gathered to exchange ideas. Participants included
We are hiring! Two PhD Positions are available as part of the NWO-funded WildMarsh project, focusing on trophic #rewilding in coastal ecosystems! Collaborate with a team from Wageningen University and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) as we explore how reintroducing large animals 🦌🐃 in #saltmarshes impacts biodiversity and coastal resilience against climate change. 🌱🌊:
What an extraordinary week at hashtag#ISBW15_WSC, “the largest gathering of hashtag#seagrass experts on the planet,” in beautiful Naples! 🌿🌍 Great seagrass research, seagrass!, delicious food, an amazing venue, and lovely people (photos below):
🚀 Field Project in Marine Sciences: Mission Accomplished! 🌊 122 dedicated Wageningen University & Research students immersed themselves in both ecological and social marine fieldwork techniques, analyzing the intricate socio-ecological system around Texel
Wrapping up three productive fieldwork weeks in Eleuthera, The Bahamas. During this time, we kicked off Delphine Carroll ‘s MSc. project on seagrass-turtle-shark interactions and established a fruitful collaboration with Nicholas Higgs and the incredible team at the Cape Eleuthera Institute.
Does deep learning and coding deter you from using it? As ecologists, we experienced that too, but we have dived in. In our new paper, led by Rebecca James, we employed deep learning to automate the analysis of aerial drone imagery to assess spatial patterns within subtidal #seagrass meadows and the distribution of turtles UNDERWATER 🌊🐢.
Now you can try deep learning on your own system because we provide accessible, open-access tools to automatically classify vegetation and animals in aerial imagery.
Looking for the next best thing to study? Tropical seascapes often consist of interlinked mangroves-seagrass-coral ecosystems but they are rarely investigated together! In this new review led by Sara Pino Cobacho, we identified key research questions that need to be addressed regarding biogeochemical connectivity in tropical seascapes;
