Scientists use fossils to assess the health of Florida’s largest remaining seagrass bed

The seagrass is greener along Florida’s Nature Coast … figuratively, that is. A new study published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series shows that seagrass ecosystems along the northern half of Florida’s Gulf Coast have remained relatively healthy and undisturbed for the last several thousand years.

This is not the case for most other seagrass ecosystems the world over, nearly 30% of which have disappeared since 1879. An estimated 7% of seagrass beds were lost each year between 1990 and 2009. Those that remain are generally not faring well, and the discovery of a healthy refugium is a rare event.

“Nothing is really pristine today, because humans have altered all of Earth’s environments, but this is about as good as it gets,” said Michal Kowalewski, senior author of the study and the Thompson chair of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Figuring this out wasn’t easy, though. The extraordinary changes humans have made to the planet not only jeopardized the health of entire ecosystems, they’ve also made it nearly impossible for us to know what a healthy ecosystem should look like in the first place.