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Decline and Recovery of Seagrass Ecosystems— The Dynamics of Change

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SEAGRASSES: BIOLOGY, ECOLOGYAND CONSERVATION

Abstract

The distribution of seagrass beds has often been described in the literature as if these communities were naturally static components of coastal ecosystems (Larkum, 1977; McRoy and McMillan, 1977; Orth and Moore, 1983; Kirkman and Kuo, 1990), disturbed only by human influences.Aparadigm of seagrass bed stability, developed for large bed-forming seagrasses such as Posidonia as in the Mediterranean Sea (Boudouresque et al., 1980), and thewestern and southern coasts of Australia (Larkum, 1976; Larkum andWest, 1983; Kirkman, 1978), suggested that sea level had been stable for the last 5–8,000 years and assumed that these large monospecific seagrass beds were static for that period.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Plant Biology (Botany M90), The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, 6007, Australia

    Diana I. Walker & Gary A. Kendrick

  2. School of Environmental Science, Murdoch University, Murdoch, 6152, Australia

    Arthur J. McComb

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  1. Diana I. Walker
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  2. Gary A. Kendrick
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  3. Arthur J. McComb
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Walker, D.I., Kendrick, G.A., McComb, A.J. (2007). Decline and Recovery of Seagrass Ecosystems— The Dynamics of Change. In: SEAGRASSES: BIOLOGY, ECOLOGYAND CONSERVATION. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2983-7_23

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