Habitat fragmentation within the world's ecosystems is a widespread and ubiquitous problem. Habitats are often in decline and/or degradation worldwide, and many are at risk of being lost permanently. As habitats experience degradation or loss, they typically go through phases of fragmentation. Habitat fragmentation occurs when large contiguous habitats are broken into small discrete habitats with increasing isolation among patches, and this phenomena is seen in both terrestrial and marine environments. Often, these irregular, widely separated patches shrink in size and eventually disappear. Typically, attention has focused on more obvious and well know environments such as tropical rain forests, coral reefs, and mangrove forest. However, recently more attention has been given to seagrass habitat as a threatened ecosystem with overall loss rates comparable to those more charismatic ecosystems.

Because these areas support abundant and diverse communities of plant and animal life, and house 99% of our commercially harvested fishery species during at least one critical phase of their life cycle, understanding fragmentation and the impact in these systems is imperative. The overall goal of this project is to determine the response of nekton to variability in fragmentation of seagrass meadows within an estuarine complex. The rationale for the proposed research is that information on how fragmentation affects fisheries populations will allow resource managers to make informed decisions on conserving and protecting this habitat type.

Understanding the process of fragmentation and its effects on dynamic processes occurring in seagrasses will help make better decisions on understanding their ecological role, habitat preservation, coastal development, and fisheries management. Specifically, the goals of this experiment are to: (1) identify fragmented seagrass beds within Corpus Christi and Aransas Bay using a GEOXT Trimble unit that creates a shape file which will be accessed in Arcmap and can provide an array of patch attributes that will describe fragmentation between sites; (2) describe the effect of fragmentation on nekton diversity and abundance as a function of extent of fragmentation using an epibenthic sled; (3) examine if growth rates of a seagrass-dependent fish, red drum, are influenced by varying fragmentation; (4) and observe fine scale movement of seagrass-dependent fish within a fragmented seagrass system.