Sarasota Bay is growing its meadows back

Seagrass is a slow witness. It grows where light reaches the bottom, and light reaches the bottom where the water stays clear. A meadow coming back is a bay reporting that the water above it has been improving for years.

In 2018 the region had its worst year on record for wastewater overflows, alongside a red tide that lasted more than a year. What came next was not a rescue. It was plumbing. Local governments put about $300 million into upgrading wastewater infrastructure and retrofitted more than 6,000 acres of the watershed with regional stormwater treatment.

Then the water answered. Between 2022 and 2024 the bay gained 1,912 acres of seagrass, a 19 percent increase. It now holds 36 percent more than it did in 1988, and it is still 12 percent below its 2016 peak.

Dr. Chris Anastasiou, who leads the mapping, put it plainly: "The gains we saw in Sarasota Bay proper are very encouraging. We still aren't back to where we were in 2016, but hopefully, these trends will continue, and we will get there."

This is what prevention looks like when it works. There is no ribbon to cut for nitrogen that stayed out of the bay. The meadow is the ribbon, and it is nursery, pasture and shoreline armor for a coast that lives on its water.

Happy World Oceans Day to Sarasota Bay, and to the people who kept at it.

The 2024 seagrass mapping, from the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program and the Southwest Florida Water Management District: https://sarasotabay.org/press-release-district-reports-gains-in-seagrass-coverage-in-sarasota-bay/ The director's note on what drove the recovery: https://sarasotabay.org/directors-note-2024-seagrass-maps/