NSF Seagrass Wasting Disease Project
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Seagrass Wasting Disease Project, including researchers from Alaska to Southern California, is a coastwide Northeast Pacific survey aimed at developing and disseminating best practices for global seagrass disease surveillance. To do so, the project has applied AI to develop a rapid assessment tool (EeLISA) for detection of seagrass wasting disease. Over three years, project researchers have also coupled in situ observations and microbial analyses with drone-based mapping to document, for the first time at scale, the potential impact of seagrass wasting disease, and other climatic drivers of change, on seagrass ecosystems.
As heatwaves and disease outbreaks worsen under climate change, it’s crucial to understand how eelgrass meadows will respond. This project provides a new understanding of vulnerability and resilience in these essential coastal ecosystems by integrating multi-modal data across time and space. Interdisciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration has been key to enabling the project’s success.
~ Lillian Aoki, University of Oregon’s Data Science Initiative; previously with Cornell University
Together, researchers that are part of this project seek to understand an important driver of seagrass ecosystems around the world. Seagrass ecosystems provide important services to coastal regions including primary production, carbon storage, nutrient cycling, habitat for fisheries species, and erosion control. The Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) has identified seagrass extent and composition as an Essential Ocean Variable (EOV). This project has provided new tools and technology to inform observations of seagrass dynamics along the Pacific Coast of North America, in regions subject to different stressors. It provides early warning of some regional declines and baseline information to monitor future changes associated with seastar wasting disease, heat waves, and other climate stressors in the Northeast Pacific.
The new tool kit of field surveys coupled with drone surveillance allows us to monitor on a continental, transboundary scale for the first time, one of our most essential west coast habitats - eelgrass meadows. This study shows wasting disease is a pervasive influence on eelgrass decline and a useful early-warning sentinel for coastal change associated with a warming ocean.
~ Drew Harvell, University of Washington, Friday Harbor Laboratories & Cornell University
For more information please see some of the recent project publications:
Aoki et al. 2023. UAV High-Resolution Imaging and Disease Surveys Combine to Quantify Climate-Related Decline in Seagrass Meadows. Oceanography https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2023.s1.12
Yang et al. 2023. Low‐Altitude UAV Imaging Accurately Quantifies Eelgrass Wasting Disease From Alaska to California. Geophysical Research Letters, 50(4), p.e2022GL101985. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL101985
Aoki et al. 2022. Disease surveillance by artificial intelligence links eelgrass wasting disease to ocean warming across latitude. Limnology and Oceanography https://doi.org/10.1002/lno.12152
Beatty et al. 2022. Predictable Changes in Eelgrass Microbiomes with Increasing Wasting Disease Prevalence across 23° Latitude in the Northeastern Pacific. American Society for Microbiology https://doi.org/10.1128/msystems.00224-22
Yang et al. 2020. Developing an Introductory UAV/Drone Mapping Training Program for Seagrass Monitoring and Research. Drones, 4(4), 70. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones4040070
Seagrasses build some of the most valuable coastal ecosystems in the world, storing carbon, protecting against coastal erosion, and supporting fisheries and the people that depend on them. To keep these global ecosystems working we need innovative approaches that integrate from satellites to genomics and across borders, which is why this project has been so exciting.
~ Emmett Duffy, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
