Bight ’23 kicking off regional assessment of eelgrass bed health

The Southern California Bight Regional Monitoring Program is kicking off a first-of-its-kind regional monitoring survey this September to evaluate the health of the region’s eelgrass beds based on their ecological functioning.

The Submerged Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) study element – part of the 2023 cycle of the Bight program (Bight ’23) – will take a bioassessment-based approach to evaluating the ability of eelgrass beds to provide refugia to fish and other animals, as well as attenuate ocean waves and sequester carbon.

Field crews participated in an intercalibration exercise last spring to ensure they can collect comparable, high-quality sampling data for this ecologically fragile habitat.

Researchers plan to use the Bight survey data as they work to build a scoring tool for assessing eelgrass health.