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Seagrass beds provide tremendous services to society, including the storage of carbon, with important implications for climate change mitigation. Prioritizing conservation of this valuable natural capital is of global significance, and including seagrass beds in global carbon markets through projects that minimize loss, increase area or restore degraded areas represents a mechanism towards this end. Using newly available Caribbean seagrass distribution data, we estimated carbon storage in the region and calculated economic valuations of total ecosystem services and carbon storage. We estimated the 88 170 km²of seagrass in the Caribbean stores 1337.8 (360.5–2335.0, minimum and maximum estimates, respectively) Tg carbon. The value of these seagrass ecosystems in terms of total ecosystem services and carbon alone was estimated to be $255 billion yr⁻¹and $88.3 billion, respectively, highlighting their potential monetary importance for the region. Our results show that Caribbean seagrass beds are globally substantial pools of carbon, and our findings underscore the importance of such evaluation schemes to promote urgently needed conservation of these highly threatened and globally important ecosystems. 

*Differential disturbance severity effects on forest vegetation structure, species diversity, and net primary production (NPP) have been long theorized and observed. Here, we examined these factors concurrently to explore the potential for a mechanistic pathway linking disturbance severity, changes in light environment, leaf functional response, and wood NPP in a temperate hardwood forest. *Using a suite of measurements spanning an experimental gradient of tree mortality, we evaluated the direction and magnitude of change in vegetation structural and diversity indexes in relation to wood NPP. Informed by prior observations, we hypothesized that forest structural and species diversity changes and wood NPP would exhibit either a linear, unimodal, or threshold response in relation to disturbance severity. We expected increasing disturbance severity would progressively shift subcanopy light availability and leaf traits, thereby coupling structural and species diversity changes with primary production. *Linear or unimodal changes in three of four vegetation structural indexes were observed across the gradient in disturbance severity. However, disturbance-related changes in vegetation structure were not consistently correlated with shifts in light environment, leaf traits, and wood NPP. Species diversity indexes did not change in response to rising disturbance severity. *We conclude that, in our study system, the sensitivity of wood NPP to rising disturbance severity is generally tied to changing vegetation structure but not species diversity. Changes in vegetation structure are inconsistently coupled with light environment and leaf traits, resulting in mixed support for our hypothesized cascade linking disturbance severity to wood NPP.