This slow loss of seagrass may go unnoticed against a shifting baseline through time. Global climate change will exacerbate these impacts (see Plate 1), especially for meadows that lack ecological resilience; a major challenge to those scientists providing coastal management advice or modeling future trajectories. In 2012 many members of the international seagrass

scientific community attended the 10th International Seagrass Biology Workshop in Brazil. This workshop series commenced in Japan around 20 years ago to stimulate global discussion on directions for seagrass research and to increase understanding Selleckchem Navitoclax of the services provided by healthy seagrass ecosystems (Coles et al., 2014). This conference series sponsored the compilation of a global seagrass methods book in 2001 (Short and Coles, 2001) development of the World Seagrass Association Inc. in 2002; an

atlas of seagrass distribution in 2003 (Green and Short, 2003) along with development of a seagrass red list (Short et al., 2011), global monitoring programs and a seagrass research discussion list – the Seagrass Forum. At the 2012 ISBW meeting to stimulate ongoing initiatives and to build on this record it was proposed to invite the seagrass community to submit manuscripts to a special journal edition of the Marine Pollution Bulletin. The aim was to capture recent science results specifically in the areas of understanding change GSK1120212 cell line and resilience in a world whose climate has become less predictable. The emphasis Evodiamine would be on indirect impacts, trophic connections and the interaction of seagrass systems with climate change parameters in line with the philosophy of the Marine Pollution Bulletin. The fifteen manuscripts submitted range over a variety of topics associated with the title and theme of the edition – “Seagrass meadows in a globally

changing environment”. Monitoring change in seagrass meadows at a global scale is a challenge in itself. The last 20 years has seen the development of number of programs responding to this resulting in three papers in the special edition that document long term regional and local changes in seagrass communities around the world from Europe (Potouroglou et al., 2014) to the Western Pacific including Australia (Short et al., 2014), and Singapore (Yaakub et al., 2014a and Yaakub et al., 2014b). Understanding what parameters are important for assessing seagrass in monitoring programs is critical to this effort; the papers by Christiaen et al., 2014 and Zhang et al., 2014 help answer some of these issues by examining the use of nitrogen isotopes and nitrogen ratios for understanding the influences of the urban and agricultural environment and signals in nearby seagrass meadows.