Seagrasses are marine flowering plants that form extensive meadows in intertidal and shallow, subtidal, coastal environments. Seagrass meadows are among the most productive ecosystems in the world and provide habitats and food for a diversity of marine life (Natural England, 2023).
The EU LIFE Recreation ReMEDIES project, or ‘Reducing and Mitigating Erosion and Disturbance Impacts affecting the Seabed,’ ran from July 2019 to October 2024. One of the five focal areas for the REMEDIES project was the Solent Maritime Special Area of Conservation (SAC). As part of the ReMEDIES project, monitoring data were collected across selected sites within the Solent Maritime SAC to help understand the extent and condition of seagrass habitat.
Natural England has a statutory duty to report on the condition of the seagrass habitats within SAC sites every six years. After a comprehensive review and cataloguing of all available ReMEDIES reports and data related to the Solent Maritime SAC, the information was organized into coherent site groupings to enable data analysis. This partly overcame data limitations, but inconsistent survey methods and data gaps prevented some reliable comparisons between sites and over time using inferential statistics.
This report will inform a future condition assessment of seagrass at sites surveyed through the ReMEDIES project, so can only draw a recommendation based on a specific suite of data. it is apparent that there are positive, negative, and inconclusive indicators of seagrass condition at sites across the Solent.