Award: OCE-1906622

This award was part of a larger collaborative research project to understand how hurricanes may impact valuable coastal habitats like seagrasses. Seagrasses provide many important benefits to humans, like shoreline protection, fisheries production, and carbon sequestration. Understanding how hurricanes may harm these habitats is therefore critical. We set out to measure how seagrasses themselves and the animal communities that depend on seagrasses may be injured or changed after hurricanes. This project focused on the impacts of Hurricane Florence in 2018 on seagrass habitats in North Carolina and compared changes to impacts of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 in Texas. During this project, we brought together data from 100's of samples taken in North Carolina prior to Hurricane Florence including measurement of invertebrate, fish, and seagrasses. This allowed the research team to design an additional sampling of seagrass habitats after Hurricane Florence to understand the effects of the storm on the whole food web which will be further reported in linked awards. Also, we measured how nutrients within seagrass changed over one year following Hurricane Harvey in Texas to compare to changes in seagrass in North Carolina. Freshwater run-off from land after hurricanes can bring large amounts of nutrients (like nitrogen and phosphorus) to coastal habitats. Nutrient content of seagrass is important because it can control seagrass growth and determine the value to animals as a food source. In Texas we previously found that right after Hurricane Harvey, seagrass areas that had a lot of freshwater run-off also had faster growth, which may mean these extra nutrients helped damaged seagrass recover. We did not find higher amounts of nutrients in seagrass tissues in the year following the hurricane, however. It does not seem that this nutrient boost is benefiting seagrasses in the longer-term, at least in terms of nutrients in their tissues. This finding adds to our growing knowledge of how valuable coastal habitat may be harmed or recover after hurricanes. As part of this project, one technician was trained in analytical laboratory techniques such as nutrient content and stable isotope analysis of plant tissue. We also submitted one data set for permanent archiving and presented the results at a scientific meeting. Last Modified: 07/07/2020 Submitted by: Lauren Yeager