| Popis: |
This chapter provides a summary of the methods and approaches that can be used to protect seagrasses including legal instruments, management practices, and planning techniques. Management questions for tropical seagrasses are best framed in terms of the range of natural variation and the resilience of the bed to impacts. If seagrasses recover quickly from an impact without the loss of dependent flora and fauna, the need for protection and mitigation strategies is less. Less resilient and more highly stressed (because of greater human development impacts) temperate species may need more rigorous protection. It is easy to use area and density/biomass as surrogates for environmental health, but it is important to include the measures of variability and measures of primary and secondary productivity. Coastal development pressures are enormous and it is difficult to defend a small area of seagrass without both detailed information on ecosystem and economic values as well as community support. It may not be possible to stop a development but the location and process of the development may be changed. Better on-site management during a construction phase with scientific oversight can guide contractors to better practice. Interactive processes, such as this may be possible where stopping development cannot be achieved. An incremental protection of seagrasses is better than no protection at all. |
