A habitat you cannot see from the shore
Seagrass meadows grow on sandy and muddy bottoms, from a few metres to over forty metres deep in clear Mediterranean water. They shelter juvenile fish, stabilise sediments and store carbon, but most of their extent is invisible from land.
A habitat map answers three questions before any restoration work: where the meadow is today, where it used to be, and where conditions would still allow it to grow.
What a good map contains
- The extent of the habitat, with the date of the survey.
- Its condition — dense, sparse, fragmented, dead matte.
- The confidence of each mapped area: ground-truthed, modelled, or inferred.