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USE OF WAVE EXPOSURE TECHNIQUE FOR PREDICTING DISTRIBUTION AND ECOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SEAGRASS ECOSYSTEMS
Citation:
ROBBINS, B. D., M. FONSECA, P. E. WHITFIELD, AND P. J. CLINTON. USE OF WAVE EXPOSURE TECHNIQUE FOR PREDICTING DISTRIBUTION AND ECOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF SEAGRASS ECOSYSTEMS. Seagrass Management: It's Not Just Nutrients! - Proceedings of a Symposium, St. Petersburg, FL, August 22 - 24, 2000. Greening, H.S. (ed.), Tampa Bay Estuary Program, St. Petersburg, FL, 171-176, (2002).
Impact/Purpose:
To enhance our understanding of seagrass distribution
Description:
The development of seagrass patches and subsequently, the landscape that they define, is typically thought to be dependent on the phenotypic response of seagrass to environmental factors such as light/nutrients (Dennison et al. 1993), sedimentation (Harlin and Thorne-Miller 1981), and disturbance (Fletcher and Fletcher 1995). Hydrodynamic forces have also been shown to have an impact on the structure and function of aquatic macophyte habitats (see review by Fonseca 1996). Within estuaries, the marked developmental differences in seagrass patches have been linked to water movement either via tidal currents (Fonseca et al. 1983) or wind-generated waves (Fonseca and Bell 1998) with the recognition that while hydrodynamics modify seagrass, seagrasses in turn, modify hydrodynamics (Fonseca and Cahalan 1992). Therefore, by modeling hydrodynamics our understanding of seagrass distribution with estuaries should be enhanced.