Seagrass Flower Collection

As home to the world’s largest seagrass ecosystem, the GBR’s meadows provide nurseries and food sources for endangered species like turtles and dugongs whilst acting as natural filters by removing pollutants such as fine sediment and excess nutrients from the water.

Multiple pressures affect the health of seagrass ecosystems, which may result in the decline and fragmentation of seagrasses across a meadow. The SeaGrow nurseries are innovative nurseries using aquaria to grow seagrass plants and collect seeds to help restore damaged seagrass meadows. With help from the local community, we collect seagrass flowers between August and November, store them in our nurseries, and wait for the seeds to naturally drop out. These seeds are then used to restore areas of the bay where seagrass is struggling to recover.
 

We will be collecting seagrass flowers to obtain seagrass seeds for:

• Experiments aimed at optimising seed transition into resilient adult plants;
• Increasing seagrass abundance and genetic variability in our SeaGrow nurseries;
• Conducting restoration experiments to investigate how to upscale and increase the effectiveness of current seagrass restoration methods.