Rethinking Seaweeds via Applications and Technologies: Composition, Toxicology, Economy and Sustainability

This book explores the basic structure, distribution, ecological, and commercial applications (pharmaceutical, medical, cosmetic, nutritional; food and feed source, agriculture, industrial, biodiesel, and nanotechnology), risks, and sustainability of seaweeds. Also, this book presents in detail the primary and secondary metabolites and their significance in traditional and pharmaceutical medicine, as well as cosmetics. Using various computational and informatics frameworks, targeted seaweed omics research can quickly advance our understanding of molecular biological processes and help address today’s most pressing environmental and social issues. Furthermore, this book explains how seaweed can operate as a “carbon capture and storage” system in nature. It suggests a framework for the term “forensic carbon accounting," which will be important in building a technique for ocean afforestation. Moreover, this book highlighted seaweed resilience research as important for better understanding species-specific sensitivity to marine heatwaves and identifying which coastal sites are most vulnerable to regime changes. Added to the above, this book deeply discusses different technologies that are used to isolate bioactive compounds from seaweed. Additionally, this book discusses the technical and social framework based on ecosystem awareness that supports the objective of sustainable seaweed benefit use. Authors assess policy development, awareness, challenges, and advertising benefits in order to draw attention to the significance of the topic of our book. The information and knowledge presented in the book on the advantages and uses of products based on seaweed would be of particular interest to researchers in the marine field, postgraduate students, and audiences from different disciplines who are interested in marine topics and seaweeds in particular. Socioeconomic research on seaweed uses are beneficial to society and decision-makers alike. Finally, this book motivates the audience to rethink seaweeds as vital components that support many ecosystems in their natural state and offer several ecological and economic services to humans.