Seagrass Helps to Eliminate Plastics from Coastal Areas A new study has reported that Posidonia oceanica seagrass—a kind of endemic marine phanerogam that plays a crucial ecological role in the marine environment—can trap and eliminate plastic materials abandoned at the sea. This natural mechanism could trap about 867 million plastic per year in coastal areas. Image Credit: Jordi Regàs. The first author of the study, which was published in the Scientific Reports journal, is the tenure-track 2 lecturer Anna Sànchez-Vidal, who is part of the Research Group on Marine Geosciences of the Faculty of Earth Sciences of the University of Barcelona (UB).