Hidden biodiversity: Spatial mosaics of eelgrass genotypic diversity at the centimeter to meadow scale.

(a) An eelgrass meadow in Bodega Harbor, CA seemingly lacks diversity given that only one macrophyte species dominates the seascape, the marine angiosperm Zostera marina. Although the magnitude of eelgrass genotypic richness itself was not surprising (Hughes & Stachowicz, 2009; Kamel et al., 2012; Reynolds et al., 2017), coordinate-based mapping showed that these genotypes are naturally intertwined at the scale of only a few centimeters. Eelgrass genotypes show considerable genetically based phenotypic variation in traits that influence the outcome of intergenotypic interactions (Abbott & Stachowicz, 2016). Keywords: clonality; diversity maintenance; diversity mapping; ecological genetics; intraspecific diversity; seagrass; spatial variation EN clonality diversity maintenance diversity mapping ecological genetics intraspecific diversity seagrass spatial variation 1 5 5 11/03/22 20221101 NES 221101 At first glance, images of homogenous-looking green seagrass meadows (Figure 1a) do not epitomize "biodiversity" in the way that species-rich mosaics of coral reefs or rainforests might. [Extracted from the article]