How We re Bringing Seagrass Back to This Scottish Bay.

Hello and welcome back to Wild Earth Earths and Mossy Earth Field Notes. We are here at Longman Bay today to do some coring. So it's a very exciting time at Wild Earth Earths. We have finally started planting seagrass. So it's been a lot of prep, a lot of planning, a lot of surveying, seed collecting, but now over the last few months we have been planting. We've been planting away and getting some restoration done. So coring is our main restoration activity at the moment and it involves transplanting seagrass with its roots and rhizomes in a sediment tube from one site to another. So we're very lucky up here in the Murray Firth that we have quite a lot of healthy donor meadows and all the surveying we've been doing over summer and all of the mapping means that we now know it's safe to take material from here, Longman Bay, and we're moving it to Red Castle which is a site which used to have seagrass, still has a tiny bit, but we're really wanting to bolster that population. Coring is a great activity because it does move sediment as well as seagrass from one site to another and it just means that the seagrass has a little bit more to hold on to essentially. It's more stable and you're moving its whole habitat with it so it's more likely to survive. It's been shown to have quite a lot of success on intertidal habitats. Subtidally however, which we're not doing here at the first at the moment, the most successful method is by transplanting their roots. So our friends at Sea Wilding have been doing that really well. So we've been at this since November I believe and it's going really well. We're getting into a good bit of a rhythm here. Now it's February, we've planted 0.2 hectares and that may not seem like a lot and it's quite hard to visualise but it's more than what we planned to do this winter. So what we have to do first off at the donor site, which is here at Longman, is sort out all our equipment. So this is what the back of the truck looks like on a coring day. It is rammed. We have lots of the waders, gloves, we've also got a couple of boxes of the coring pipes themselves and then we've also got two trolleys which help us on the way to get this job done. So we have a couple of trolleys, then we have boxes of plastic pipes which are the vessels in which we move the sediment and then we have metre square temple quadrats that we've made and we also use trowels. So that all goes in a little trolley and we have to drag it across the sediment to the donor points. So we have very specific areas that we can take from and plant in and this is due to the surveying that we did in the summer. So we have points that we've surveyed so we know what the density was in the summer and so by taking from them we will know if extracting the seagrass material has had any effect on the health of the meadow and the density come next summer. Once we are at the extraction location, I'm going to call it, what we do is we lay out that temple quadrat, then we use the pipes to cut out essentially 10 cores of sediment in the metre squared. We're doing these metre square quadrats to help us estimate how much material we've taken and to know exactly where we've taken them from. So again we can monitor our impact on the bed. Milo, how do we record where we're taking from? So we're using Kewfield to record everywhere where we've collected cores from. We collect a maximum of 50 from a 5 to 10 square metre area. On Kewfield we'll put a point down and say how many cores we've taken and what the date was and then hopefully we can map out our impact further down the line by expanding the waypoints to the size correlated to how much we've collected and then we know when we do new surveys in the following season, we can map our impact and see if we've had any change because we have previous figures of percentage cover and what seagrass is present in. Once we've collected all of the material we need, we have to put it back in the box and luckily 75 cores fits exactly into one of our plastic boxes which is what we need at the donor site to do one sort of planting area, which I'll explain in a bit. Then the box is very heavy and it quite often takes two people to push it around or we split the weight so it's a little bit easier to transport and then we have to repack the truck again. So it is a little bit of packing and repacking to get everything to fit in the truck at the moment but we've kind of got a system that makes it work. Once it's back in the truck we make our way over to Redcastle. The planting pattern is basically a big square divided into four. Each quarter is a group of 75 cores which we tend to collect in a day. That quarter is separated into five clusters of 15 cores and after we've laid all that out then we get to planting. So the idea is that we can either use a trowel or a pipe to dig a little hole and remove some sediment, put that to the side and we can take our new seagrass core and put that in and it's just like gardening. We're trying to get the core as flush with the top of the sediment as possible. This hopefully means that any erosion or covering by sediment is limited. We try to plant the cores quite close together so they're a nice sort of stable clump. It's better to do this so the clump is more resilient to any wave action or sediment burial than just one core by itself. So by clumping them together and not sort of spreading them evenly we're giving them a much better chance of persisting after we've planted them. It can look like we're not moving much seagrass at all but in winter the seagrass dies right back. So although sometimes it does feel a little bit like we're moving tubes of sand from one place to another we are still moving a lot of potential seagrass meadow. It's good to do coring in the winter because at this time of year the seagrass is in its dormant phase so some research suggests that seagrass will be less stressed out by being moved and therefore have more chance of success in persisting at the restoration site. It's also the time when slip olympids, which are the invasive species that we're really trying to counteract here, are also in their dormant phase so they're not reproducing as much so there's less risk of us moving larvae or shells from one site to another. Slip olympids are an invasive species and they can completely overpower and cover native species like mussels and oysters so it's really important that we note them and yeah and try and minimize any movement of that species but they are spreading which is really unfortunate. So far the main challenge of this method is trying to scale it up so as you can hopefully see in some of the footage it's quite hard work moving all the stuff back and forward, packing the kit. We only have one vehicle at the moment so that limits our space so it does limit the amount we can do in a day and in a tidal window but we have over the days and weeks got it down to a little bit of a fine art and we're managing to go at quite a nice rate so once we had that all figured out then yeah we're good to go. So the plan is to keep going with coring for the next couple of months and into the spring where we'll be planting our seeds. It is really exciting to actually be finally getting some seagrass planted and inching our way towards that goal of 4.2 hectares. That goal is part of the SMEEF project so the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund and they're supporting seagrass planting all over Scotland really trying to prove that this kind of restoration can happen at scale and we're playing a really important part of that so yeah it's very exciting to see that finally getting going and off the ground. I would also like to say a very big thank you to all the volunteers that have come out and helped us plant. It's definitely not the easiest activity it's quite physical but it sounds like everyone's really had a good time and we've loved having you out with us in the field. I just want to thank you very much for watching this Field Notes update and if you're a Mossy Earth member thank you so much for your continued support. If you'd like to join us here at Mossy Earth you can contribute to loads of different amazing restoration projects including this one by becoming a member at mossy.earth. Thank you so much for watching this video and we'll see you again very soon. Cheers!