Assessing Non-market Benefits of Seagrass Restoration in the Gulf of Gdańsk

Abstract

Seagrasses are a group of flowering, underwater plants that grow close to the sea shore across the world. As ecosystem engineers and habitat formers they provide important functions to marine ecosystems (Spalding et al., 2003), and contribute to human well-being through a number of benefits they deliver. Seagrass meadows are a nursery habitat for certain fish species (McArthur and Boland, 2006), they attenuate wave energy and thus contribute to coastal defense and erosion control (Fonseca and Cahalan, 1992), and they support water purification and nutrient cycling (Barbier et al., 2011). In