This brochure is part of a series of images, diagrams and fun facts produced by the Global Seagrass Trajectories working group, funded by the National Science Foundation and conducted at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in SantaBarbara, California. It describes the temperate and tropical distributions of seagrasses globally, their role as food and habitat for a variety of organisms, as well as being effective indicators of change.

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Coastal ecosystems including coral reefs, mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and salt marshes are being lost at alarming rates, and increased scientific understanding of causes has failed to stem these losses. Coastal habitats receive contrasting research effort, with 60% of all of the published research carried out on coral reefs, compared to 11–14% of the records for each of salt marshes, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows.

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In many coastal locations, seagrass meadows are part of a greater seascape that includes both marine and terrestrial elements, each linked to the other via the foraging patterns of consumers (both predators and herbivores), and the passive drift of seagrass propagules, leaves, roots and rhizomes, and seagrass-associated macroalgal detritus. With seagrasses declining in many regions, the linkages between seagrass meadows and other habitats are being altered and diminished.

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Environmentally distributed ecological networks (EDENs) are growing increasingly important in ecology, coordinating research in more disciplines and over larger areas than ever before, while supplanting post hoc syntheses of uncoordinated research. With the rise of multiple broadly focused, continental-scale EDENs, these networks will be directing an increasingly large proportion of resources in ecology, which warrants a review of their use.

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Seagrasses, marine flowering plants, are widely distributed along temperate and tropical coastlines of the world. Seagrasses have key ecological roles in coastal ecosystems and can form extensive meadows supporting high biodiversity. The global species diversity of seagrasses is low (b60 species), but species can have ranges that extend for thousands of kilometers of coastline.

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This brochure summarizes what are seagrasses, their role in the productivity of ecosystems, their importance to humans as well as a collection of fun facts.

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This report was published by the Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone (LOICZ) project with the support of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF). It provides new assessment tools for coastal management programs and discusses the key science outputs of the project. Science communicators at IAN worked with authors and designers to create nine figures for the 40-page report.

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This is a practical handbook on how to communicate science effectively. The first part is an introduction to the principles of science communication – what effective science communication is, why it is important, and how to do it. The principles in these chapters include how effective science communication can change societal paradigms and make one a better scientist.

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Seagrasses, marine flowering plants, have a long evolutionary history but are now challenged with rapid environmental changes as a result of coastal human population pressures. Seagrasses provide key ecological services, including organic carbon production and export, nutrient cycling, sediment stabilization, enhanced biodiversity, and trophic transfers to adjacent habitats in tropical and temperate regions.

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This is a practical handbook on how to communicate science effectively. The first part is an introduction to the principles of science communication-what effective science communication is, why it is important, and how effective science communication can change societal paradigms and make one a better scientist.

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