Skip to main content

Smooth Cordgrass

Status: Established

Habitat: Marine

Threat: Negative impacts on native intertidal communities

Description

  • a robust perennial grass with shoots that can reach 1.3 m in height.

Information

  • spread vegetatively and by seed
  • colonises sheltered mudflats at a tidal level below normal salt marsh vegetation
  • produces dense monoswards
  • monoswards reduce water movement and increase sedimentation, causing marsh levels to rise and preventing other species from establishing.

Consequence

  • reduces biodiversity
  • dense monoswards on mudflats reduce the food resources available for wildfowl and wading birds

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

21 April 1926 to 8 September 2022