Newport Bay water quality and eelgrass bed stability

Eelgrass (Zostera spp.) is a marine flowering plant found in coastal regions worldwide and provides critical habitat, nutrient cycling, and shoreline buffering to ecosystems. Populations are declining in many of these regions due to the negative impacts poor water quality has on light availability and photosynthesis. The Lower Newport Bay (LNB) in Southern California is a heavily developed recreational harbor and estuarine habitat supporting species from varying taxa, including eelgrass. To understand the impact water quality has on eelgrass persistence in LNB, we selected four sites with long-term stable eelgrass populations and four sites with transitional eelgrass populations to collect weekly measurements of weather conditions, light availability, and water quality parameters. Through repeated measure ANOVAs using date as a between factor, we found that stable eelgrass beds had significantly higher light availability, dissolved oxygen concentrations, and bluer water on the Forel-Ule...