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Food for thought

Editorial
8
Food for thoughtGuest BlogResearch
March 19, 2023

Visiting one of the worlds most remote seagrass meadows

Eva Rothausler On a narrow stretch along the northern-central coast of Chile, the seagrass Heterozostera nigricaulis (syn. Zostera nigricaulis, Heterozostera tasmanica) occurs in three isolated patches no more than 300 km apart. It is a common intertidal to subtidal seagrass in the Zosteracea family and is found growing in protected and soft-bottom areas. Heterozostera nigricaulis is native to the southern coast of Australia (Coyer et al. 2013), from where it colonized Chile some 100s to 1000s years ago (Smith et al. 2018). In Australia, they form extensive meadows that produce large quantities of non-buoyant seeds and specialized vegetative rhizomes used…
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Editorial
1
Food for thoughtPS Updates
July 30, 2021

Ambition really is still critical for seagrass

Eight years ago sat on a roof top café at Swansea University we ambitiously set up a small marine conservation organisation called Project Seagrass. Swansea has always seemed a fitting place for Project Seagrass to start. After all it was deemed the ‘lovely ugly town’ by its most famous son, the poet Dylan Thomas. Thomas also went on to describe the place as the ‘graveyard of ambition’, a phrase that’s referred to in an artistic inscription outside the local train station by a more modern Swansea poet that states “Ambition is Critical”. The analogies to seagrass are striking, both entities…
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Benjamin Jones
0
Food for thoughtOpinion
September 10, 2020

Communities are central to conservation

Earlier this week saw the release of the Edinburgh Declaration on post-2020 global biodiversity framework, a bold call to action urging Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to work more closely with communities in order to meet 20 biodiversity goals set out in the Aichi accord, signed 10 years ago in in Nagoya, Japan. The vision set out in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework of “Living in harmony with nature”, and the 2030 mission as set out in the Zero Draft document make one thing pretty clear. Conserving biodiversity, for people and the planet, cannot happen without people. For…
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Benjamin Jones
2
Food for thoughtOpinion
September 3, 2020

It’s an ill bird that fouls its own nest

Nearly 30,000 tonnes of sewage containing human waste is to enter the UK despite potential problems for human health. Yet, what stinks for me is that sewage and livestock waste are driving seagrass loss across the UK – we already have a problem, and we don’t need to exacerbate this. Back in 2018, we released a study documenting this problem and called on the government to make changes - but water companies, some farmers and the Government have not, and it would appear are still not, doing enough to address theses risks. Photo by Stijn te Strake on Unsplash While the…
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