The intervention
TIMELINE
WHAT WAS DEPLOYED
Between 1999 and 2018 the Virginia Institute of Marine Science broadcast 74.5 million eelgrass (Zostera marina) seeds into 536 unvegetated plots totalling 213 ha in four shallow lagoons on the seaside of Virginia's Eastern Shore: South Bay, Cobb Bay, Spider Crab Bay and Hog Island Bay [1]. Eelgrass had been eradicated from these lagoons by 1933 by a slime mold disease together with a hurricane, and none was documented there for over 70 years, taking with it the bay scallop fishery and the brant goose [1]. Water quality monitoring and light modelling, together with the discovery of natural patches smaller than 2 square metres in one bay in the late 1990s, identified seed recruitment limitation rather than degraded water quality as the constraint on recovery [1]. Seeds were collected each spring from established beds, held in temperature-controlled water baths through the summer, then hand broadcast from a moving boat each fall at 25 to 50 seeds per square metre into plots of 0.2 to 0.4 ha [1]. Seeded plots flowered and dispersed seed and the meadows expanded on their own: aerial mapping recorded 3,612 ha of vegetated bottom by 2018, of which 2,028 ha (56%) is in South Bay, and the seeding effort covered only 6% of the total restored area [1]. Growth by bay, from the operator's funding application: South Bay was first mapped at 15.7 ha in 2001, all sparse cover, and reached 1,075.53 ha in 2011 with 63.6% at moderate to dense cover; Cobb Bay 3.9 ha in 2003 to 364.69 ha in 2011 (75.8% moderate to dense); Hog Island Bay 25.5 ha in 2007 to 199.31 ha in 2011 (33.5%); Spider Crab Bay 0.3 ha in 2004 to 129.59 ha in 2011 (56.6%) [3]. Measured services: summer turbidity at a fixed sonde in South Bay fell as bed area grew, with a regression coefficient of -0.69 and R2 of 0.42 on log transformed data after accounting for year [1]; sediment in meadow older than 9 years held 1.3 times the carbon and 2.2 times the nitrogen of sediment colonised 1 to 5 years earlier [1]; a bay scallop restoration begun in 2008 produced a wild population, and the first intensive survey, in July 2012 over a 1,000 acre area of South Bay, estimated 1.9 million scallops under 20 mm and 46,000 over 20 mm [1][3]. The setback is documented with equal weight. A marine heat wave from 12 to 25 June 2015 cut shoot density at six long-term plots in the centre of the South Bay meadow from 599 shoots per square metre in July 2014 to 43 in July 2015, and the carbon stock in the upper 5 cm of sediment there fell from 399 g C per square metre in 2013 to a minimum of 250 in 2017, recovering only to 317 by 2018, still below the pre-disturbance level [2]. Canopy patchiness was no longer visible in aerial images by 2018 and shoot densities at those plots had returned to 406 to 503 per square metre [2]. Seeding continues: a US$2,259,633 NOAA award administered through the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program funded a four-year extension into Burtons Bay from 2023, whose first season sowed 800,000 seeds across 80 acres against a 15 acre first-year target [4][5].
HOW IT WORKS
Physical: eelgrass seed is collected by hand and machine from established donor beds during a two to three week window when reproductive shoots hold ripe seed, held in flowing seawater tanks until release, separated from plant material, then stored in re-circulating seawater at about 30 PSU and 20 degrees C until the fall [3]. Seeds are broadcast by two people from a moving boat along eight evenly spaced lines across a pre-marked plot, before the normal mid-November germination and after the summer period of seed predation, at 25 to 50 seeds per square metre in plots of 0.2 to 0.4 ha [1][3]. Seeds settle rapidly, do not move far from where they fall and are buried by biotic and abiotic processes; surviving seedlings grow into a dense bed that damps waves, stabilises sediment and clears the water, and then produces its own seed, which expands the patch edges [1]. Because the lagoons are shallow (0.8 to 1.6 m below mean sea level, tidal range 1.2 m) and enclosed, seed stays in the system [2]. No planting of adult shoots, no engineering works and no maintenance of the established meadow are involved [1]. Administrative: the work is run as a standing program of a state marine science institute, financed year to year from a dedicated state recreational fishing licence fund, federal coastal zone management and fisheries grants, NSF long-term ecological research grants and private grants, with The Nature Conservancy organising volunteer seed collection on its coastal reserve and university partners carrying the long-term ecological measurement [1][3][5]. Mapping is done annually from aerial imagery flown in late spring as part of the same institute's Virginia-wide submerged aquatic vegetation survey [1][3].
The measurements
OUTCOMES
| METRIC | VALUE | METHOD | MEASURED BY | INDEPENDENT | PERIOD | SRC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eelgrass mapped across the four seeded bays | 3612 hectares (against 213 ha seeded in 536 plots with 74.5 million seeds) · baseline virtually none (before restoration; no eelgrass documented in these lagoons for over 70 years after 1933) | Aerial imagery flown in late spring at 1:24,000, beds mapped and classed very sparse (1 to 10%), sparse (11 to 40%), moderate (41 to 70%) or dense (70 to 100%) | VIMS SAV Monitoring and Restoration Program, which also carried out the seeding | ○ | 2018 | [1] |
| Share of the restored area that was actually seeded | 6 % of total restored area; the remainder arrived by natural expansion from the seeded plots | Seeded plot area compared with mapped vegetated area | VIMS SAV Monitoring and Restoration Program | ○ | 1999 to 2018 | [1] |
| South Bay share of the restored area | 2028 hectares (56% of the four-bay total; the other three bays hold 1,584 ha) | Same aerial mapping | VIMS SAV Monitoring and Restoration Program | ○ | 2018 | [1] |
| South Bay mapped eelgrass in the earlier survey years | 1075.53 hectares in 2011 (2,656.56 acres), 63.6% at moderate to dense cover; 15.7 ha when first mapped in 2001, all sparse; 200 ha in 2006, all sparse · baseline 15.7 (2001, first mapping after seeding began) | Annual aerial survey mapping | VIMS, reported in its own funding application | ○ | 2011 | [3] |
| Cobb, Hog Island and Spider Crab Bays mapped eelgrass | 364.69 / 199.31 / 129.59 hectares in 2011 (Cobb 75.8%, Hog Island 33.5%, Spider Crab 56.6% at moderate to dense cover); first mapped at 3.9 ha in 2003, 25.5 ha in 2007 and 0.3 ha in 2004 respectively · baseline 3.9 / 25.5 / 0.3 (first year each bay was mapped after seeding (2003, 2007, 2004)) | Annual aerial survey mapping | VIMS, reported in its own funding application | ○ | 2011 | [3] |
| Area seeded through 2012 and the extent it had produced | 365 acres seeded, into which the source states over 47 million seeds were broadcast; it reports an estimated 1,900 ha (about 4,700 acres) containing eelgrass by 2012, almost 14 times the seeded area | Seeding records against annual aerial survey mapping | VIMS | ○ | 1999 to 2012 | [3] |
| Summer turbidity against bed area at a fixed station in South Bay | -0.69 regression coefficient of log mean summer turbidity on log bed area, R2 = 0.42, after accounting for year | Continuous 15-minute turbidity from a YSI sonde 25 cm above the bottom (South Bay from 2003, Spider Crab Bay from July 2011), May to August means, against mapped bed area around the station | VIMS, data public at vecos.vims.edu | ○ | 2003 onward | [1] |
| Sediment carbon enrichment with meadow age | 1.3 times the carbon of sediment colonised 1 to 5 years earlier, in meadow older than 9 years (nitrogen 2.2 times) | Four replicate 5 cm sediment cores at each of 67 sites across 7 square kilometres of the South Bay meadow, binned by time since establishment, bare-sediment stock subtracted for net values | University of Virginia and VIMS team | ○ | cores collected 2013 | [1] |
| Shoot density at the six long-term inner plots through the June 2015 marine heat wave | 43 shoots per square metre in July 2015 (plus or minus 19), from 599 (plus or minus 20) in July 2014; 503 and 406 at higher and lower recovery sites by 2018 · baseline 599 (July 2014) | Annual shoot counts at six of the original 0.4 ha restoration plots, monitored since 2007, plus nine outer sites; the heat wave was identified from the NOAA Wachapreague station record, 12 to 25 June 2015 | University of Virginia team under the NSF Virginia Coast Reserve LTER, with the restoration program principal investigator as a co-author | ○ | 2014 to 2018 | [2] |
| Sediment carbon stock at the inner meadow sites after the heat wave | 250 g C per square metre in the upper 5 cm in 2017, the minimum, from 399 in 2013 and 386 in 2014; 317 in 2018, significantly above the 2017 minimum but still significantly below pre-disturbance · baseline 399 (2013, before the heat wave) | Repeated sediment cores at the same six inner plots, upper 5 cm, with Tukey contrasts between years | University of Virginia team under the NSF Virginia Coast Reserve LTER | ○ | 2013 to 2018 | [2] |
| Sediment carbon stock at the outer meadow sites, which lost few shoots | 372 g C per square metre in the upper 5 cm in 2018, from 249 in 2013, a significant increase; patch-scale comparison in 2017 gave 268 in vegetated patches against 199 in bare patches · baseline 249 (2013, before the heat wave) | Sediment cores at outer sites colonised by natural expansion, nine sites in 2013 and six in 2018, and paired vegetated and bare patches within the inner plots | University of Virginia team under the NSF Virginia Coast Reserve LTER | ○ | 2013 to 2018 | [2] |
| Bay scallops in South Bay, first intensive survey | 1900000 scallops under 20 mm, plus 46,000 over 20 mm, estimated over a 1,000 acre area, following caged broodstock spawning from 2009 · baseline none (fishery extinct since the 1930s) | Diver survey over a 1,000 acre area of South Bay; the application states no survey design | VIMS | ○ | July 2012 | [3] |
| First season of the Burtons Bay expansion | 80 acres sown with 800,000 seeds, against a 15 acre first-year target and a three-year proposal of 60 acres of eelgrass and six million scallops · baseline 15 (first-year target) | Delivery reported by the funding agency, not an ecological measurement | VIMS project team, reported by the NOAA Office for Coastal Management | ○ | 2023 to 2024 | [4] |
● independently measured○ operator-reported· not stated in any source
COST BASIS
- CAPITAL
- not published
- OPERATING
- not published
- FUNDING
- 3 · 148286
- 4 · 2259633
- 1
- 1
- 1
- 1
Documented figures. (1) The operator's application to the Virginia Recreational Fishing License Development Fund for May 1, 2013 to April 30, 2014 sets out VMRC funding of US$148,286 and VIMS funding of US$44,345, a total cost of US$192,631; that budget covers restoration work in both Chesapeake Bay and the coastal bays, so it is not a coastal-bays-only figure, and it is a request in a proposal, not audited expenditure [3]. (2) The current phase is a US$2,259,633 federal award over four years for Burtons Bay, targeting at least 60 acres of eelgrass and more than 6 million bay scallops [4][5]. (3) Labour is partly volunteer: over 3,500 volunteer hours collecting more than 10 million seeds are recorded for the project [1]. Dividing any of these by an area would produce a cost per hectare that no source states, so no per-unit figure is given.
The assessment
PRECONDITIONS
- A diagnosis that the constraint is seed recruitment limitation rather than water quality: here that came from water quality monitoring, light modelling and the discovery of natural patches smaller than 2 square metres in the late 1990s [1]
- Historical presence of the species, so that suitable conditions are demonstrable rather than assumed: these lagoons carried eelgrass until 1933 [1]
- Shallow, enclosed lagoons (0.8 to 1.6 m below mean sea level, 1.2 m tidal range) where broadcast seed settles quickly and stays in the system [1][2]
- Water clear and cool enough: the authors attribute the contrast with the declining Chesapeake Bay and Maryland coastal bays to cooler, more oligotrophic conditions and limited human population in the watershed [1]
- A donor bed within reach and the capacity to harvest in a two to three week window, then hold seed in temperature-controlled seawater through the summer [3]
- Large, densely seeded plots rather than small ones: 0.2 to 0.4 ha at 25 to 50 seeds per square metre, against an international average of about 460 seeds in plots under 1 square metre [1]
- A commitment measured in decades: annual seeding sustained for more than 20 years, with self-stabilising feedbacks taking years of meadow expansion to develop [1]
- Organised volunteer labour for seed collection: over 3,500 hours and more than 10 million seeds [1]
- Annual aerial mapping capability to measure area, and long-term plots to measure density and sediment [1][3]
- Tolerance for heat disturbance: a single marine heat wave removed most shoots in the centre of the meadow and set sediment carbon back for at least three years [2]
OPERATOR HINDSIGHT
Stated in the sources. The 2020 synthesis [1]: seeding is now directed at bays where eelgrass is still absent, because habitat suitability modelling puts current occupancy at about 33 square kilometres against an estimated historical 116, and hydrodynamics may be preventing natural recruitment in some of those bays; the bay scallop has returned to only a fraction of its estimated historical abundance and will need further intervention, including more seagrass area and better broodstock genetic diversity; the authors attribute their result to large, densely seeded plots and a 20-year commitment, against an international norm of about 460 seeds in plots under 1 square metre monitored for 12 months. The funding application [3]: burying seed rapidly in the fall, by hand or mechanically, raises establishment rates and would re-establish areas with fewer seeds, which is why the team has been developing an underwater seed planter and running site-specific burial-depth experiments; a decline mapped in Spider Crab Bay in 2011 is attributed to late-season photography over turbid water rather than to plant loss, which is a caution about the mapping method itself. The heat wave study [2]: sediment carbon recovery lags shoot recovery, so a project counting on carbon credits, which require stocks to persist for 30 years, should expect a single heat event to set the carbon clock back by several years, and depth and position within the meadow determine which parts survive it.
TRANSFERABILITY ASSESSMENT
| AXIS | SCORE | RATIONALE |
|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL INTENSITY | ●○ | No total is published; the documented figures are US$192,631 for one program year covering two systems [3] and a US$2,259,633 four-year federal award for the current phase [4]. Modest sums, but delivered as a grant-funded program sustained over two decades, not routine budget. |
| GOVERNANCE DEPENDENCY | ●● | Delivered through existing institutions and funding lines, with no source recording a need for new legislation or unusual authority; the one statutory change came 20 years in, when Virginia allowed restored underwater grasses to count toward carbon offset credits in March 2020 [1]. |
| ENVIRONMENTAL SPECIFICITY | ●○ | Needs a shallow, enclosed lagoon (0.8 to 1.6 m below mean sea level, 1.2 m tidal range) where broadcast seed stays put, and a system whose binding constraint is seed supply rather than water quality; eelgrass declined over the same period in the adjoining Chesapeake Bay and in Maryland's coastal bays under nutrients, sediment and warming [1][2]. |
| SKILLS AND MAINTENANCE | ●○ | The established meadow needs no maintenance and is described as self-sustaining [1], but delivery needs a marine science team: a two to three week harvest window, temperature-controlled summer seed storage, GPS plot layout, diver counts and an annual aerial survey [1][3]. |
| FUNDING REPEATABILITY | ●○ | Funded again and again for over 20 years, but through annual applications to a state recreational fishing licence fund [3] and competitive federal, research and philanthropic grants [1][4], not a standing budget line for restoration. |
| POLITICAL DURABILITY | ●● | Continuously funded across state and federal administrations from 1999 to the present: state licence-fund grants, three NSF LTER award cycles, a 2009 federal stimulus grant, a March 2020 state statute on carbon crediting, and a US$2,259,633 award in 2023 under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act [1][4][5]. |
TOTAL 8/12 · T2
POLITICAL TEST
The program has been re-funded across every change of state and federal administration since 1999. Its recurring base is the Virginia Recreational Fishing License Development Fund, applied for year by year, with US$148,286 requested for 2013/14 alongside US$44,345 of institutional funding [3]. Federal money arrived under successive administrations: NOAA grant NA09NMF4630308 under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, three NSF Virginia Coast Reserve LTER award cycles (DEB-0621014, DEB-1237733, DEB-1832221) [1], and a US$2,259,633 Coastal Zone Management Habitat Protection and Restoration Award in 2023 drawn from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program [4][5]. In March 2020 the Virginia General Assembly passed SB783, allowing restoration of underwater grasses to count toward carbon offset credits [1]. The intervention also has a durability property that budget cycles do not control: once a meadow is established it needs no budget line, because expansion runs on the plants' own seed [1].
The file
SOURCES
- [1] peer_reviewed · Restoration of seagrass habitat leads to rapid recovery of coastal ecosystem services · Robert J. Orth, Jonathan S. Lefcheck, Karen S. McGlathery, Lillian Aoki, Mark W. Luckenbach, Kenneth A. Moore, Matthew P. J. Oreska, Richard Snyder, David J. Wilcox, Bo Lusk · Science Advances 6(41), eabc6434 (doi:10.1126/sciadv.abc6434) · 2020-10-07 · en · PRIMARY · www.science.org Full 10-page PDF downloaded from science.org and text-extracted, then read in full: abstract, results, discussion, methods, acknowledgments and reference list. Open access under CC BY-NC. Written by the team that carried out the restoration, so it is a primary but operator-authored account; the paper states no cost figures.
- [2] peer_reviewed · Seagrass Recovery Following Marine Heat Wave Influences Sediment Carbon Stocks · Lillian R. Aoki, Karen J. McGlathery, Patricia L. Wiberg, Matthew P. J. Oreska, Amelie C. Berger, Peter Berg, Robert J. Orth · Frontiers in Marine Science 7, article 576784 (doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.576784) · 2021-01-07 · en · PRIMARY · www.frontiersin.org Full 14-page PDF fetched from Frontiers and text-extracted; read the introduction, site description, results and figure text. Open access. Led by University of Virginia authors under the NSF Virginia Coast Reserve LTER, but the restoration program's principal investigator is a co-author, so it is not measurement independent of the operator. Source of every heat wave figure in this record.
- [3] grant_application · Restoration of Submerged Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) Habitat in Chesapeake Bay and the Virginia Coastal Bays: a proposal submitted to the Virginia Recreational Fishing License Development Fund · Robert J. Orth (principal investigator) · School of Marine Science, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary; published by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission as Recreational Fishing Advisory Board item 1212-08 · 2013 · en · PRIMARY · mrc.virginia.gov Full 15-page PDF fetched and text-extracted; read the application summary and costs, the findings to date (per-bay mapped areas and the 2012 scallop survey), the proposed methods and the timeline. It is the operator's own application to a state fund, so its figures are operator-reported and its budget is a request, not audited expenditure; the record does not state that the request was granted, because no fetched source says so.
- [4] funder_web_page · Record-Breaking Eelgrass Restoration in Virginia's Eastern Shore · NOAA Office for Coastal Management · 2024 · en · PRIMARY · INDEPENDENT · coast.noaa.gov Page fetched and read in full; a short impact story of roughly 400 words, marked (2024). The funder's own record of its award: US$2,259,633 under the Coastal Zone Management Habitat Protection and Restoration Awards, an initial three-year proposal of 60 acres of eelgrass and six million scallops, and a first year of 800,000 seeds across 80 acres against a 15 acre target. Its statement that South Bay holds over 10,000 acres of previously restored eelgrass is not reconciled with the 3,612 ha (about 8,925 acres) mapped across all four bays in 2018 [1], and is not used in this record.
- [5] operator_web_page · VIMS to expand restoration of seagrass, bay scallops on Eastern Shore · Virginia Institute of Marine Science, William and Mary · 2023-05-15 · en · PRIMARY · www.vims.edu Fetched and read. Gives the US$2.25 million NOAA award from Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act money administered by the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program, a four-year duration, targets of at least 60 acres of eelgrass and more than 6 million bay scallops, the project leads, and the partner list. Its 'nearly 10,000 acres' description of South Bay is an operator claim and is not used as a measurement.
- [6] dataset_catalogue_entry · GPS Locations of Seagrass Sites in Hog Island Bay and South Bay, VA 2010-2021 (knb-lter-vcr.188.17, alternate identifier VCR11180) · Karen J. McGlathery · Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research Project · 2021-12-31 · en · PRIMARY · www.vcrlter.virginia.edu Catalogue page fetched and read; the data files themselves were not downloaded. Used for the study-area map point (37.445615, -75.840000) and for the monitoring design: plots seeded between 2001 and 2008, 64 plots in Hog Island Bay (58 seagrass, 6 bare) and 12 in South Bay (6 seagrass, 6 bare) sampled from 2010, South Bay bare plots dropped after 2013 because seagrass colonised them, and 12 further sites added in 2017 in areas of natural expansion. Time period 2010-06-01 to 2021-12-31.
RECORD
- PUBLISHED
- 2026-08-16
- LAST VERIFIED
- REVIEW DUE
- 2027-02-16
- RUBRIC
- v1.0
- STATUS HISTORY
- · operating · Record published.
- RIGHT OF REPLY
- Not required under rubric v1.0 for an operating record. Because this record grades the operator's own measurement at E3 and documents a die-off event in the restored meadow, right of reply will be offered to the VIMS SAV Monitoring and Restoration Program and to The Nature Conservancy's Virginia Coast Reserve before this record is promoted or distributed, and any response received will be published here in full.
- LANGUAGE
- All sources are English-language publications: two peer-reviewed journal articles, one state-fund application published by a Virginia agency, one federal agency page, one operator news release and one research data catalogue entry.
- CONFIDENCE
- Solid, read directly from the fetched documents rather than from abstracts: the seed count (74.5 million), plot count (536), seeded area (213 ha), 2018 mapped area (3,612 ha) and South Bay share (2,028 ha, 56%), seeding densities and plot sizes, the turbidity regression, the sediment carbon and nitrogen ratios and the sampling design, and the funder list [1]; every heat wave figure, including 599 to 43 shoots per square metre and the 399 to 250 to 317 g C per square metre sequence [2]; the per-bay mapped areas and cover classes for 2001 to 2011, the 2012 scallop survey, and the 2013/14 budget [3]; the 2023 award and the Burtons Bay first-year figures [4][5]. Thin or judgment-based. (a) Currency. The most recent measured extent this record can cite is 2018 [1]; no fetched source gives a mapped area for the four bays after that, so the headline figure is eight years old at publication. The VIMS annual survey continues, and its 2024 Chesapeake Bay totals were published, but no coastal-bays-only figure was retrievable. This is the record's largest weakness and the first thing re-verification should close. (b) Start date. Seeding is dated to 1999 in [3] and in the methods of [1], while the same paper dates the establishment of the restoration to 2001 and [2] records the South Bay plots as seeded in 2001; the timeline uses year precision and states the disagreement. (c) The scallop program start is 2008 in [1] and 2009 in [3]. (d) Area claims disagree by a wide margin: 3,612 ha across four bays in 2018 (about 8,925 acres) [1] against 'over 10,000 acres' in South Bay from the funder [4] and 'nearly 10,000 acres' from the operator [5]; the acre claims are unsourced round numbers and are excluded. The Burtons Bay phase duration also disagrees: the operator describes a four-year project [5] while the funder describes an initial proposal of 60 acres of eelgrass and six million scallops over three years [4]; both are stated and neither is adopted as a completion date. (e) Cost. No total programme cost exists in any fetched source; capital_amount, operating_annual and per_unit are null. The US$192,631 figure is a one-year budget request covering both Chesapeake Bay and the coastal bays, not a coastal-bays cost and not audited spend, and no source confirms it was awarded. (f) 'Over 47 million seeds' and 'an estimated 1,900 ha' in [3] are approximations and are kept in prose, not coded as exact values. (g) The bay scallop density comparison in [1] (0.04 to 0.4 per square metre against 1 to 2 historically) refers to restorations in other locations and to historical catch data, not to measurements in these bays, and is therefore not recorded as an outcome. (h) Independence. Every headline measurement is made by the restoring institution or by close collaborators who include the restoration's director; the evidence grade is E3 for that reason, and the record does not adopt the operator's and funder's description of the project as the most successful seagrass restoration in the world, which is a comparative claim no fetched source measures. (i) Outcome status. 'Operating' rests on continued annual seeding through 2018 [1], the meadow's recovery in canopy cover by 2018 after the 2015 die-off [2], and the funded Burtons Bay phase running from 2023 [4][5]. Without a post-2018 mapped area, 'operating' is an inference from continued programme activity rather than from current measured extent, and a re-verification finding of substantial loss would move it to degraded. (j) Coordinates are a study-area point from an LTER catalogue page, not a bay centroid, as stated in location.notes. No figures were estimated or interpolated by the registry; all nulls reflect absence in sources.
CITE THIS RECORD
change4planet.org. C4P-CST-0003: Seed-based eelgrass restoration in the Virginia coastal bays, United States: 213 hectares seeded, 3,612 hectares mapped in 2018. Grades T2/E3 (rubric v1.0). Last verified 2026-08-16. https://change4planet.org/records/c4p-cst-0003-virginia-eelgrass-seeding