Eight temperate seagrass species have been previously reported in coastal waters off the Korean Peninsula. Recently, the species, Halophila, which are mainly predominant in tropical and subtropical areas, have been discovered in the southern coast of ...
Eight temperate seagrass species have been previously reported in coastal waters off the Korean Peninsula. Recently, the species, Halophila, which are mainly predominant in tropical and subtropical areas, have been discovered in the southern coast of Korea for the first time. This species were identified as Halophila nipponica. H. nipponica has been distributed in a warm temperate region of Japan where is under the influence by Tushima Warm Current, and was not previously found outside the Japanese archipelago. In this study, we carried out some numerical experiments to understand the process how the spores of H. nipponica disperse under the influence of the flow in coastal waters of Korea. For this, we used the EFDC to reproduce the dispersion process of the spores in terms of a particle tracking method. The numerical results represented a clockwise circulation of the flow at ebb tide with a velocity of roughly 3 cm/s. However, the particles did not move away too far from the spores site because the flow is fairly weak. In addition, the flow patterns had no significant difference from season to season.