Undervannsskogenes dyr, planter og alger: naturbaserte verktøy for å beskytte og gjenopprette biologisk mangfold

Underwater environments such as seagrass beds, kelp forests and deep-sea corals are ecosystems with high biological diversity, important for many organisms through spawning grounds, protection and food access, protect coastal areas and store carbon from the atmosphere. Conservation and restoration of these habitat types is therefore important to continue benefiting from these ecosystem services in the future. RESTORESEAS is an international collaborative project with eleven countries to develop new methods for the protection and restoration of these ecosystems. This includes efforts to restore ecosystems, estimates of past and present extent and function, as well as future scenarios for vulnerable areas. NORCE contributes expertise in the use of environmental DNA, both for insight into the state of organisms back in time, for mapping organisms in sediments and water bodies linked to this type of ecosystem from Norway to Brazil, and monitoring disease-causing organisms and pathogens. The coordinated approach provides an overview of the challenges associated with the conservation and monitoring of vulnerable areas, so that management strategies can be designed to preserve ecosystem functions in the long term in light of challenges such as human impact and climate change. In the first phase of the project, NORCE has worked on the development of sampling methodology for environmentalDNA and contributed to the harmonization of the methodology in the project. NORCE has communicated this through a workshop aimed at all project participants. NORCE has also collected samples along coastal areas in Sweden and Norway and started analyzes of these samples.