Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2021 Oct;96(5):2009-2030.
doi: 10.1111/brv.12736. Epub 2021 May 20.

Seagrasses in an era of ocean warming: a review

Hung Manh Nguyen  1 , Peter J Ralph  2 , Lázaro Marín-Guirao  1   3 , Mathieu Pernice  2 , Gabriele Procaccini  1
Affiliations
Review

Seagrasses in an era of ocean warming: a review

Hung Manh Nguyen et al. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2021 Oct.

Abstract

Seagrasses are valuable sources of food and habitat for marine life and are one of Earth's most efficient carbon sinks. However, they are facing a global decline due to ocean warming and eutrophication. In the last decade, with the advent of new technology and molecular advances, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of studies focusing on the effects of ocean warming on seagrasses. Here, we provide a comprehensive review of the future of seagrasses in an era of ocean warming. We have gathered information from published studies to identify potential commonalities in the effects of warming and the responses of seagrasses across four distinct levels: molecular, biochemical/physiological, morphological/population, and ecosystem/planetary. To date, we know that although warming strongly affects seagrasses at all four levels, seagrass responses diverge amongst species, populations, and over depths. Furthermore, warming alters seagrass distribution causing massive die-offs in some seagrass populations, whilst also causing tropicalization and migration of temperate species. In this review, we evaluate the combined effects of ocean warming with other environmental stressors and emphasize the need for multiple-stressor studies to provide a deeper understanding of seagrass resilience. We conclude by discussing the most significant knowledge gaps and future directions for seagrass research.

Keywords: climate change; conservation; multiple-stressor studies; ocean solution; ocean warming; restoration; seagrass die-off; seagrasses; tropicalization.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

REFERENCES

    1. Allakhverdiev, S. I., Kreslavski, V. D., Klimov, V. V., Los, D. A., Carpentier, R. & Mohanty, P. (2008). Heat stress: an overview of molecular responses in photosynthesis. Photosynthesis Research 98, 541-550.
    1. Anderson, T. R., Hawkins, E. & Jones, P. D. (2016). CO2, the greenhouse effect and global warming: from the pioneering work of Arrhenius and Callendar to today's earth system models. Endeavour 40, 178-187.
    1. Apostolaki, E. T., Vizzini, S., Santinelli, V., Kaberi, H., Andolina, C. & Papathanassiou, E. (2019). Exotic Halophila stipulacea is an introduced carbon sink for the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Scientific Reports 9, 9643.
    1. Arias-Ortiz, A., Serrano, O., Masqué, P., Lavery, P. S., Mueller, U., Kendrick, G. A., Rozaimi, M., Esteban, A., Fourqurean, J. W., Marbà, N., Mateo, M. A., Murray, K., Rule, M. J. & Duarte, C. M. (2018). A marine heatwave drives massive losses from the world's largest seagrass carbon stocks. Nature Climate Change 8, 1-7.
    1. Assis, J., Fragkopoulou, E., Frade, D., Neiva, J., Oliveira, A., Abecasis, D., Faugeron, S. & Serrão, E. A. (2020). A fine-tuned global distribution dataset of marine forests. Scientific Data 7, 119.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources