Hosted by: HUB Ocean & Uppsala University
Seagrass meadows are vital ecosystems, supporting biodiversity, improving water quality, protecting coastlines, and capturing carbon. Yet despite their importance, we still lack accurate maps of their distribution. Mapping seagrass is inherently challenging—especially in turbid or deeper waters—and the data needed to protect these habitats remains fragmented across institutions, geographies, and formats, or is still missing altogether.
In this webinar, we explore how combining seagrass datasets from many sources on a cloud based geospatial platform can help create a more complete and usable picture of reefs—from local to global scales.
Introduction talk by Lina Mtwana Nordlund, Associate Professor in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development at Uppsala University, Sweden, GOOS/IOC-UNESCO panel member, and contributor to the UN Ocean Decade's Working Group on ecosystem and biodiversity protection, will share insights on mapping and monitoring seagrass, and current global efforts to improve access to seagrass data.
This will be followed by a live demonstration of the Ocean Data Platform, showing how seagrass maps can be brought together, explored, combined, and contributed to in one place. We will put ODP to work during the webinar by combining some of the data sources mentioned in the introduction talk to inspire how data from global and local scales can co-exist.
We’ll close with an open discussion on the challenges and opportunities of building a more connected seagrass data ecosystem. What data would you like to see on ODP?
What we will cover
Introduction to Seagrass mapping local to global
Introduction to HUB Ocean’s Ocean Data Platform
Live demonstration of seagrass data layers
How to access, combine, and contribute seagrass data
Open Q&A
SPEAKERS
Lina Mtwana Nordlund, Uppsala University, GOOS/IOC-UNESCO, UN Ocean Decade; Gustav Kågesten, Science Director, HUB Oceanand Brian Free, Geospatial Data Analyst, HUB Ocean
Who should join
This session is open to anyone working with seagrass science, conservation and data, including marine researchers, seagrass managers, NGOs, policy makers and ocean data practitioners.
About the hosts
HUB Ocean is building the Ocean Data Platform aggregating, standardizing and making accessible ocean datasets from partners around the world — accelerating science, conservation and sustainable ocean management. [hubocean.earth →]
This webinar is part of HUB Ocean's 2026 ocean ecosystem webinar series, exploring the science, data and policy dimensions of the ocean's most critical habitats.