Posidonia oceanica is a protected endemic seagrass of Mediterranean sea that fosters biodiversity, stores carbon, releases oxygen, and provides habitat to numerous sea organisms. Leveraging augmented research, we collected a comprehensive dataset of 174 features compiled from diverse data sources. Through machine learning analysis, we discovered the existence of a robust correlation between the exact location of P. oceanica and water biogeochemical properties. The model's feature importance, showed that carbon-related variables as net biomass production and downward surface mass flux of carbon dioxide have their values altered in the areas with P. oceanica, which in turn can be used for indirect location of P. oceanica meadows. The study provides the evidence of the plant's ability to exert a global impact on the environment and underscores the crucial role of this plant in sea ecosystems, emphasizing the need for its conservation and management.

For years, Tidal, a project within Alphabet's "moonshot factory" X division, has been using cameras, computer vision and machine learning to get a better understanding of life beneath the oceans, including monitoring fish off the coast of Norway. Now, MIT Technology Review can report, Tidal hopes its system can help preserve and restore the world's seagrass beds, accelerating efforts to harness the oceans to suck up and store away far more carbon dioxide. The project's ambitious mission is to improve our understanding of underwater ecosystems in order to inform and incentivize efforts to protect the oceans amid mounting threats. It could also provide crucial answers to the many questions hanging over seagrass' role in both sucking up carbon and regulating the climate. China is copying Russia's election interference playbook China is increasingly interfering in US politics by getting its agents to create social media accounts posing as American citizens, according to research co-led by Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who has studied foreign influence on social media for years.

Whale sharks can carry up to 300 babies at once--at different fetal stages and from different fathers. Zebra sharks experience "virgin birth." These are but a mere sampling of the decade's most fascinating shark discoveries. Some 500 known species of these toothy fish ply our planet's waters, ranging from bite size to bus size, and scientists are still becoming acquainted with most of them. Since 2000, when scientists discovered shark populations were collapsing around the world, research on sharks has ramped up across many fields of study, from paleontology to neuroscience to biomechanics.

Australia is home to more than 10,000 beaches, ranging from a few dozen metres to hundreds of kilometres long. But increasingly, these beaches are slowly disappearing before our eyes. "Beaches across Australia are eroding, simply because waves come in pull sand away -- and big storm surges pull more sand away," IBM Systems Data Scientist Dr Adam Makarucha told the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration Summit in Sydney. While the likes of Gold Coast Council have invested AU$14 million into rehabilitation projects -- such as one for a 12km stretch of beach, equating to more than a million dollars per kilometre -- Makarucha said prevention is more viable than rehabilitation. Makarucha said the best way to prevent beach erosion is to look to a natural defence, such as seagrass.

"There are a number of seagrass monitoring programs that work on regional and to some degree on global scales, but most of them are really only looking at the cover and the abundance of the seagrass itself," said Emmett Duffy, director of the Marine Global Earth Observatories (MarineGEO) headquartered at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. The new grant builds on collaborative work by the Zostera Experimental Network (ZEN), led by Duffy, and will look at how climate, biodiversity and other environmental aspects can change the course of the disease. The team is deploying a wide arsenal of weapons to understand it: In addition to marine biologists, they are bringing on geographers, computer scientists, artificial intelligence and drones. Seagrasses are among the most valuable ecosystems on Earth. They provide habitat for popular fish like salmon and herring, protect shorelines from erosion and filter out nutrient pollution.