“This is a decision to decide. An important one, and not the same thing as protection,”

“On a question that has divided this parliament before, and in a month when there is considerable external interest in Greenland’s minerals, Inatsisartut spoke with one voice,” Poulsen said. “Every member present voted for it.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/72698534

“Some of these might be catchable by the end of next year,” Leask said. “I don’t know what their growth will look like in the wild.”

That’s because Arctic grayling haven’t been seen in Michigan waters for almost a century. By the 1930s, industrial activity like logging and overfishing, along with competition from non-native fish, had decimated their numbers. But three northern Michigan tribes and the state are trying to change that by reintroducing the fish to local waters.

“Our taking care of them and helping them to reestablish their population helps us to reestablish ourselves, our culture, and our traditions,” said Tina Frankenberger, the Grand Traverse Band’s tribal environmental resiliency lead.

Their work joins broader efforts by tribes around the country to restore native species — from salmon to oysters to condors — that are culturally and economically important, while also strengthening the ecosystems that these species depend on against threats like climate change.

Link to open access paper explaining

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.74211

Hi c/tidalpunk — I keep a small guide called Read Wrong: ten sea creatures, each with one sourced fact that undercuts the postcard version. The idea is how much work a label does. Most of us copy the label before we've actually looked at the animal.

The entry that reframed the whole thing for me is Steller's sea cow. It got read as endless meat — too big, too slow, too many — and it was gone 27 years after it was scientifically described. The label that kills isn't "worthless." Worthless leaves you alive to argue. Infinite leaves nothing underneath to protect.

All ten (plus the one still going), each tagged with what kind of claim it's actually making, honest count printed, sources on every fact: https://telegra.ph/Read-Wrong-Ten-Sea-Creatures-10-18

Free to read, no signup. I wrote it, so call it self-promo if that's your line — but I want the corrections. Which creature here do you think people read most wrong?

To help bring more awareness to marine conservation, overlooked aquatic organisms, and ecosystem engineers (ex. kelp and mangroves, deep-sea bacteria, and keystone species), I’m starting a monthly "Species of the Month" spotlight over on !marine@r1b.it!

The idea is simple: every month, we highlight a marine or aquatic species, dive into its ecological role, and share research/appreciation around why it matters to its ecosystem.

I know I'm a little late to get the ball rolling, but I'm opening nominations for October now! If you have a favorite aquatic species, an endangered marine animal, or an underappreciated ecosystem worker you'd like to see featured, come drop a nomination! Perhaps even one with a spoookkyy twist? You can see more information about how to do so in the original post on r1b.it.

Since this community of course isn't dedicated to my little series, it will be far easier to keep track of nominations if they are kept within !marine@r1b.it. Though, I don't want to force you all out of your bubble (or force my community upon you), so 'll be sure to keep tabs on !tidalpunk if you want to explicitly specify that you're making a nomination :)

Looking forward to seeing what species get put forward!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/72008232

Considering that the global value of the ecosystem services kelp provides is estimated at around $500 billion annually, these losses are significant. Kelp forests provide food and shelter for marine mammals, fish and invertebrates; they buffer wave energy along the shoreline and sequester carbon. Remove kelp, and the system unravels.

According to Masso, one of the reasons the Tla-o-qui-aht chose to join this project was because sea otters (Enhydra lutris) were returning to the region. “The otter played a big role in establishing our kelp forest,” Masso said. Historically, the Tla-o-qui-aht didn’t hunt the otter because they knew it ate the sea urchin, which fed on the kelp.

But European fur traders did.

Greenpeace highlighted that its activists boarded the vessel following her return from the Clarion- Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the international waters of the Pacific, where the ship surveyed deep-sea minerals. The research was carried out on behalf of UK Seabed Resources Ltd (UKSR), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Glomar Minerals.

According to Glomar Minerals, Tangaroa had departed Tahiti in late July for the CCZ to survey its license area for polymetallic nodules rich in critical minerals. The campaign was the first comprehensive geological and biological survey of the UK2 license area in more than 40 years. UKSR’s license areas cover approximately 133,000 square kilometers of deep seafloor, an area covered in polymetallic nodules containing manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earths in a single ore.

...

“If deep-sea mining is allowed to go ahead, it will strip the seafloor, risking irreversible damage to the ocean we all rely on, to supply minerals for Trump’s war machine. Pacific Peoples are at the frontline of this fight, and deep sea mining puts their way of life and cultural heritage at risk. It must not be allowed to start,” said Juressa Lee, Greenpeace Aotearoa campaigner.

These shades reduce the amount of light reaching the corals by around 60 percent. Although they don’t cool the water, they can protect the corals from UV damage.

Neither the shaded corals nor controls died during the heatwave, despite it being the second highest on record. The corals under the underwater umbrellas, regained some of their colour once sheltered by their new shading and lost less colour than expected during the heat stress event.

“Solutions like shading can offer temporary protection on small scales,”

Between August and September 2024, the M5 lab captured data on waves at a site of restored mangroves along China’s Zhanjiang coast. When Typhoon Yagi swept through the Philippines and southern China in early September, high-speed winds created waves nearly 0.9 meters (3 feet) high upon meeting the mangroves’ front edge — a record-breaking wave height observed in a mangrove ecosystem.

The team found that even those waves were dissipated by the mangroves, decreasing to 0.36 meters (1.18 feet) high after washing through a football-field length of mangrove forest. Throughout the monitoring period, mangroves at their site reliably decreased wave height from between 44%-70%.

Typically, predicting mangrove attenuation takes a lot of involved math. Field scientists have historically had to juggle a precise set of calculations: The measured density and diameters of individual mangrove plants, along with waves’ drag coefficients, turbulence and friction factors.

“We go into this kind of deep dive into physics,” said Ruth Reef, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who was not involved in the research.

Conversely, this new process is far less complicated: It involves only the waves’ relative heights divided by the number of waves sampled (represented by the variable HLn), and a parameter called the Ursell number that is calculated using wave height, length and water depth (and denoted by the variable Ur). Represented by the acronym HU, this method of calculation was first published in a 2025 study.

With successful data collection from Yagi, the lab had a rare opportunity to see whether the HU method could use wave measurements during calm weather to retroactively predict mangrove attenuation during storms. This second round of data was collected from the same Zhanjiang site during the spring of 2025.

link to open access article https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212096326000872?via=ihub

The third method is the newly developed HU method, a non-drag-based predictive framework (Hu et al., 2025). Unlike conventional models that rely on explicit drag parameterization, the HU method was built upon HLn-Ur relations, where HLn is relative wave height (ratio between in-canopy and incident wave height) over n wavelengths and Ur is the Ursell number (= Hs0 L2/D3, where L is wavelength and D is water depth at the seaward edge of the canopy), a common metric for wave nonlinearity (Phan et al., 2019). At each wavelength, a general form of the HLn-Ur relation is as follows:(1)

𝐻𝐿𝑛=1/(1+𝑎·𝑈𝑟𝑏)

....where a and b (varying with n) are calibrated from low-wave measurements. The core premise is that larger wave nonlinearity (higher Ur) enhances energy dissipation within vegetation, leading to lower HLn values [lower relative wave height]. For any given Ur [for any degree of nonlinearity/chaos in wave motion], HLn [relative wave height] can be iteratively determined along the transect as the cumulative number of wavelengths increases (Fig. 3b), thereby quantifying the progressive, distance-dependent wave attenuation induced by the mangroves. For a given wave burst, L is held constant along the transect. This simplification is justified because the transect is short (∼100 m) and the bed slope is mild, so depth variations are limited.

Fig. 3. Prediction of wave reduction in storm conditions using a web-application based on the HU method. (a) Relations of HLn and Ursell number (Ur) at 1–5 wavelengths (L) in the mangrove forest, as an illustration of the HU method. At each number of wavelengths, a fitted HLn-Ur curve can be derived based on low Hs0 cases (0.1 m < Hs0 < 0.4 m). The data points of high Hs0 cases also fall on these curves. Subsequently, for a given Ur number, the evaluation of HLn along the mangrove (as the number of L increases, dashed lines) can be obtained for both low and high Hs0 cases. The dashed lines are translated into the 2D representation in panel (b), where each line corresponds to a fixed Ur value. (b) Examples of predicted and observed relative wave height with a sequence of L with given Ur numbers. (c) Performance of the three different methods (measured by R2 values) in predicting wave attenuation. For the two methods based on CD relations (analytical and numerical modeling), we show the selected top 3 CD relations that result in highest R2 values in high Hs0 cases. For visual clarity, R2 values below 1 are plotted as 1. A complete summary of the model performance is shown in Table S4. (d) Interface of the web-application based on the HU method (see Method section and Text S1) (Zhao et al., 2025). Z. Hu et al. Climate Risk Management 54 (2026) 10

Building upon the successful validation of the HU method using the highest in situ wave measurements ever recorded in mangrove environments, we developed an interactive web-based application (https://nioz.shinyapps.io/Wave-Decay-Prediction-HU-Method/; Zhao et al., 2025) to allow non-specialists to predict storm wave attenuation by mangroves (Fig. 3). The accompanying web-application, implemented in R language, allows users to upload local wave datasets to automatically compute and visualize attenuation performance under storm conditions (Fig. 2d). The platform provides freely downloadable results and supports real-time assessment of mangrove-based wave attenuation (Zhao et al., 2025). Additional details on the computational algorithms, web-application architecture, and the analytical/numerical wave models are provided in the Supplementary Information (Text S1). This web application enables wave attenuation assessment in mangrove forests under storm conditions without the need for complex numerical modeling. It features three core interfaces: (a) Data-based Prediction: Users can upload field-measured wave data to automatically calibrate the model and predict wave attenuation under storm scenarios. (b) Custom Prediction: Allows manual entry or batch upload of storm parameters (e.g., wave height, period, depth, and vegetation width) for single or multiple scenario simulations. This allows practitioners to estimate the required mangrove width under the envisioned storm wave conditions in restoration projects. (c) Data Sharing: Serves as a collaborative platform for researchers and practitioners to contribute and access quality wave data, fostering evidence-based mangrove conservation and coastal resilience planning.

...

We envision this tool as a catalyst for science-policy integration, empowering coastal communities to design and optimize mangrove-based protection projects through accessible, evidence-based modeling. We therefore recommend the adoption of this web-application as a decision-support tool for promoting mangrove restoration and sustainable coastal resilience worldwide. Through our web-application, we could collect cases for young, mature, and mixed-complexity mangrove forests. Guidance is then provided on estimating the required cross-shore width for a target residual wave height, on the influence of planting density (by scaling width), and on recalibration over time as forests mature. These additions enable practitioners to move beyond assessing existing protection to designing new nature-based solutions.