This document presents an overview of the current state of seagrass conservation and restoration in the United States, discusses issues that should be addressed in planning seagrass restoration projects, describes different planting methodologies, proposes monitoring criteria and means for evaluating success, and discusses issues faced by resource managers.

Seagrasses are unique plants; the only group of flowering plants to recolonise the sea. They occur on every continental margin, except Antarctica, and form ecosystems which have important roles in fisheries, fish nursery grounds, prawn fisheries, habitat diversity and sediment stabilisation. Over the last two decades there has been an explosion of research and information on all aspects of seagrass biology. However the compilation of all this work into one book has not been attempted previously. In this book experts in 26 areas of seagrass biology present their work in chapters which are state-of–the-art and designed to be useful to students and researchers alike. The book not only focuses on what has been discovered but what exciting areas are left to discover. The book is divided into sections on taxonomy, anatomy, reproduction, ecology, physiology, fisheries, management, conservation and landscape ecology. It is destined to become the chosen text on seagrasses for any marine biology course.

This guidance manual ... provides technical assistance, outlines necessary steps, and provides useful tools for the development and implementation of sound scientific monitoring of coastal restoration efforts ... [and] offers a means to detect early warnings that the restoration is on track or not, to gauge how well a restoration site is functioning, to coordinate projects and efforts for consistent and successful restoration, and to evaluate the ecological health of specific coastal habitats both before and after project completion.

This thorough and informative volume presents a set of detailed, globally applicable techniques for seagrass research.The book provides methods for all aspects of seagrass science from basic plant collection to statistical approaches and investigations of plant-animal interaction. The emphasis is on methods that are applicable in both developing and developed countries. The importance of seagrasses in coastal and near shore environments, and ultimately their contribution to the productivity of the world's oceans, has become increasingly recognised over the last 40 years.Seagrasses provide food for sea turtles, nearly 100 fish species, waterfowl and for the marine mammals the manatee and dugong. Seagrasses also support complex food webs by virtue of their physical structure and primary production and are well known for their role as breeding grounds and nurseries for important crustacean, finfish and shell fish populations. Seagrasses are the basis of an important detrital food chain. The plants filter nutrients and contaminants from the water, stabilise sediments and act as dampeners to wave action. Seagrasses rank with coral reefs and mangroves as some of the world's most productive coastal habitat and strong linkages among these habitats make the loss of seagrasses a contributing factor in the degradation of the world's oceans.Contributors from around the world provide up-to-date methods for comparable collection of ecological information from both temperate and tropical seagrass ecosystems.

Human health and wellbeing cannot be sustained without proper ecosystem functioning and high biodiversity is essential to maintain such functioning. Worldwide, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources by a growing human population has imposed serious pressures on ecosystem integrity. To change the tide, the United Nations declared the current decade as the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, with the aim of “supporting and scaling up efforts to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide”. Large-scale active ecosystem restoration actions will be needed to achieve these ambitious aims. Whereas methodologies for systemic restoration of terrestrial ecosystems have been established, marine ecosystem restoration is still a young field of science, although rapidly emerging. This Research Topic proposal aims to provide a platform for the growing number of marine scientists involved in marine ecosystem restoration. The Research Topic will focus on coastal ecosystems, such as mangrove forests, salt marshes, seagrass beds, kelp forests, shellfish reefs and coral reefs, but will also welcome studies on nearshore environments such as shelf seas, Mediterranean coralligenous habitats and mesophotic reefs.

Seagrasses are becoming widely used as in situ indicators of the relative health and condition of subtropical and tropical estuarine ecosystems. To permit meaningful management of our estuaries, there is clearly a need to develop and refine ways of effectively monitoring and assessing seagrasses. Seagrasses: Monitoring, Ecology, Physiology, and