SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Coastal Ocean Processes
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1620592
Quantifying Wave Attenuation by Seagrass: A Comprehensive Review of Assessment Techniques
Provisionally accepted
- 1UCD Dooge Centre for Water Resources Research, UCD School of Civil Engineering, and UCD Earth Institute, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
- 2University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
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Seagrassess meadows, often referred to as engineering speciesecosystem engineers, play a vital role in shallow coastal waters worldwide. They can not only provide are crucial for sediment stabilization and wave energy dissipation, while also providing key ecological benefits such as ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, but also offer significant engineering benefits, including sediment stabilization and wave energy dissipation. Despite its potential biological benefits, the mechanisms behind seagrass-induced wave attenuation remain inadequately understood. Furthermore, inconsistencies in the recorded metrics complicate the comparison of findings across various experimental studies. This study aims to address these challenges by thoroughly examining six key parameters for assessing the wave attenuation performance of seagrass meadows: wave energy dissipation, drag coefficient, wave transmission coefficient, wave attenuation coefficient, wave-induced flow velocity, and turbulent kinetic energy. By systematically reviewing the most relevant lab-based experimental studies conducted from 2000 to 2024, this study summarises the developments, applications, and performance of these key parameters in analysing seagrass-induced wave dissipation, discusses how these key parameters interact and influence each other and how wave conditions and canopy characteristics influence seagrass-induced wave attenuation discussing the physical mechanism behind. The effects of currents on seagrass-induced wave attenuation performance are also investigatedinvestigated. The findings of this work provide a foundation for developing conducting a unified framework to assess the impact of canopy features and wave characteristics on seagrass-induced wave attenuation, further contributing to the development of coastal protection policies in combination with seagrass restoration guidance.
Keywords: Seagrass meadows, wave attenuation coefficient, drag coefficient, waveenergy dissipation, Wave transmission, Turbulence kinetic energy, Nature-based solutions
Received: 29 Apr 2025; Accepted: 01 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xu and Salauddin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Md Salauddin, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
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