Casco Bay Bio-regional

Learning Journey

​

 

​

The NEOC Family is thrilled to announce the Launch of Team Zostera and we would like to extend their invitation to join the two event and festivities as part of their their Casco Bay Bioregional Learning Journey! This is an exciting Initiative led by one of the orginal Hús tenants - Glenn Page and his global team called COBALT (Collaborative for Bioregional Action Learning and Transformation).  Seagrasses in Casco Bay are the keystone species - essential for recreational and commercial fisheries, and critically linked with issues such as mooring buoys, dredging, and aquaculture siting. Here in Casco Bay, they go through periods of boom and bust and team Zostera is working with Maine DEP (and a wide range of conservation organizations) to significantly expand the stewardship of this critical - and stunning - habitat. This is also about blue carbon and the future of our warming coastal ecosystem. At a global scale, seagrasses sequester approximately 10% of the carbon buried in ocean sediment annually and per hectare, seagrasses can store up to twice as much carbon than terrestrial forests. Just this month, in Australia, it was documented that seagrasses are the largest plant known to science - there they found a bed that is a single plant (Posidonia australis) spanning 180km - estimated to be 4,500 years old - and they are thought to be the world’s oldest organism estimated at 100,000 years old. They are also in major decline around the world and why attention is needed - especially in our our waters off Casco Bay.