Marine macrophytes, such as seagrasses and macroalgae, are widely distributed across the world’s coastlines, where they function as foundation organisms in nearshore ecosystems by providing habitat, food and shelter for a wide diversity of organisms and altering local environmental conditions. The coastal habitats they create have massive ecological and socioeconomic benefits and underpin ecosystem services worth trillions of dollars annually. Increasingly, however, marine macrophytes are impacted by a range of anthropogenic stressors and a better understanding of how they are responding to environmental change, and the underlying mechanisms that mediate their resilience to increasing stressors, is needed to inform approaches to their management and conservation. In this Virtual Issue we bring together some key papers published in New Phytologist over the past decade, which have shed new light on the responses of seagrasses and habitat-forming macroalgae to environmental change, and the biological processes underpinning such responses. Knowledge gaps and research priorities are identified along with a call for a greater research focus on marine macrophyte foundation species.

• Published: 4 November 2024

Editors:

Dan A. Smale,  Nathan G. King

• marine
• macrophytes
• coastal habitats
• environmental change
• conservation