Art in Your Community: Seagrass Meadow

Seagrass Meadow is a community exhibition project produced for National Science week, in collaboration with Lake Macquarie residents, local artist Liss Finney, and marine ecologists from Operation Posidonia and the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

Participants took part in a science-meets-art workshop where they learnt about seagrass meadows, to share their knowledge with community through this collaborative artwork. 

Seagrasses are unique plants that form the meadows of the sea. They provide habitat and food to many species and are important in the natural defence against climate change. They are however under immense threat from human activities, but conservation projects like Operation Posidonia are working to safeguard their future. 

ABOUT OPERATION POSIDONIA 

Posidonia australis is the largest seagrass that occurs in NSW. It is a favourite habitat of iconic species like the White’s Seahorse as well as many other fish species.

Operation Posidonia, a project of the Sydney Institute of Marine Science (SIMS), is restoring Posidonia meadows in NSW estuaries with help from local citizen scientists. Restoring Posidonia is challenging because harvesting the seagrass from existing meadows would put these already declining habitats at greater risk. A solution is using fragments of the seagrass that end up on shore due to the movement of tides and after storms. If fragments still have a rhizome, the base of the plant that anchors it to the seafloor, they can be replanted. But they must be collected in a short window of time, before tides take them back to the water, or before the sun dries them out. Citizen scientists, known as the ‘Storm Squad’ are trained by Operation Posidonia scientists and collect fragments from their local beach. After fragments are collected, they are dropped off at collection stations before being moved by the Operation Posidonia team to temporary aquaculture storage facilities. After a few months they are replanted underwater by scuba divers and form the start of a recovering meadow. 

Operation Posidonia launched in Lake Macquarie in June 2022. 

 

When

Location

Museum of Art and Culture (MAC), 1A First Street, Booragul 2284, Booragul, 2284, View in Google Maps