Abstract
Kapoposang Island and the surrounding waters has been appointed by Indonesian Governmet to be a part of waters tour park in South Sulawesi, implying the requirement of the marine resources, including seagrass ecosystems in this area, should be well managed in order to provide biodiversity protection and sustainable use of the seagrass ecosystems. For this purpose, one of basic required information is seagrass distribution and habitat structure. This study was aimed to 1) observe the location of continues seagrass beds, 2) identify the habitat structure in each site of continues seagrass beds. A combination of visual observation and transect method was applied to determine the sites of continues seagrass beds, while seagrass habitat structure was identified based on ecological habitat structure model. Study results revealed that continues seagrass beds were only found in five different sites of Kapoposang coastal waters. Seagrass habitat structure among the five sites were in variable and the highest seagrass cover was found in two sites, namely 1) site A in the north-west part of the island (S04 o 41'42.5; E118 o 56'59.5) dominated by Thalassia hemprichii and 2) site E located in the north part of the island (S04 o 41'57.8; E118 o 57'45.7) dominated by Enhalus acoroides . Both of these sites were different in heterogeneity but similar in complexity. Keywords: Thalassia hemprichii , Enhalus acoroides , continues seagrass beds, habitat structure
Highlights
Seagrasses are aquatic angiosperms, which have adapted to the marine, especially to the nearshore environment (Short et al 2001)
Site A was located at the geographic position of S04o41'42.5"; E118o56'59.5", site B was at the position of S04o41'48.8"; E118o56'57.7", site C was at S04o41'52.5"; E118o57'00.3", site D was at S04o41'56.7"; E118o57'20.3", and site E was at S04o41'57.8"; E118o57'45.7”
Other than those five sites were patchy seagrass beds, sandy bare area, and coral reefs. This result was supported by the the report of MCRMP (2007) who reported that in the surrounding waters of Kapoposang Island comprised various habitats including seagrass beds, sandy bare areas and coral reefs, a detail geographic position for the seagrass beds was not described in the report and more focused on the condition of coral reef only
Summary
Seagrasses are aquatic angiosperms, which have adapted to the marine, especially to the nearshore environment (Short et al 2001). Seagrass meadows is an important part of marine habitat in continental shelf waters and they have been found in almost all part of the world, except for Antarctic region (Hemminga & Duarte 2000). Seagrass meadows are often the dominant primary producers in coastal areas, playing a key role in trophodynamics, habitat provision, substrate stability and biogeochemical cycling (Rasheed et al 2006). The highest primary productivity of the seagrasses is found in the Indo-Pacific region (Hemminga & Duarte 2000), where Indonesian waters are included, making the seagrass ecosystems play an important role to the marine food webs (Vonk et al 2008)
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