Resilience in practice: development of a seagrass resilience metric for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Monitoring Program

Abstract

[Extract] Executive summary: Sexual reproduction is an important aspect of seagrass resilience and has been in the condition and trend reporting metrics for the inshore seagrass Great Barrier Reef Marine Monitoring Program (MMP). The reproductive effort metric has been one of three equally weighted metrics in the seagrass Index, informing the Reef 2050 Water Quality Report Card (Report Card) since its inception. A recent analysis concluded that it should be replaced with a multivariate resilience metric, which we propose here. Seagrass resilience is the capacity of the ecosystem to cope with disturbances. Central to the idea of seagrass resilience is the ability to resist disturbances through physiological processes and modifications to morphology, and recover following loss by regeneration from seed and through plant growth. Seagrass species vary in their dependence on resistance and recovery strategies. The species are classed as ‘colonising’, ‘opportunistic’, or ‘persistent’ with increasing dependency on ‘resistance’ and reduced dependency on ‘recovery’ strategies through these groups. The resilience indicator accommodates these species trait differences.