Seagrass seeds planted in Kent to restore the Thames’ underwater meadows

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Thea Cox (ZSL Conservation Project Manager) and Wenna Griggs (ZSL Conservation Project Officer) talk about the new ZSL Seagrass restoration trials in Kent.  Video: ZSL

Transcript

00:00 My name is Thea Cox, I'm a project manager in the Conservation Policy Department at ZSL.

00:04 So the importance of seagrass is really around these meadows that it creates.

00:08 Seagrass is a flowering plant that grows in the marine environment, but when it grows

00:11 together it creates these meadows and that habitat offers so many benefits to people

00:17 and to the wildlife that use the marine environment.

00:21 And that can be shelter for creatures on the coast and in our shallow seas, but also where

00:26 fish will come and have their young and it acts as a nursery ground.

00:31 So it provides incredible benefits for that wildlife, but it can also trap sediment and

00:35 can help reduce impacts on coastal communities and slow wave energy.

00:39 It can also potentially trap carbon, which can then be one of our tools in the fight

00:42 against climate change.

00:43 So it really does so much and is an incredible habitat, which is why it is so important for

00:49 the health of our oceans and for us.

00:51 So we've seen quite big declines of seagrass around our UK coast.

00:54 Some of the estimates are as high as 92% and we've lost at least 44% since the 1930s and

01:02 39% of that has happened since the 1980s.

01:06 So we've seen quite a lot of pressure on our seagrass habitat around the UK.

01:11 Restoring the Tempscape is a ZSL project looking at restoring coastal habitats together.

01:16 We're looking at oysters, salt marsh and a lot of the work we've been doing so far has

01:20 been around seagrass.

01:22 That's why we're here today to start some of our restoration trials involving seed and

01:28 the species that we're focusing most of our work on is Zostra noltei, which is the dwarf

01:33 seagrass.

01:35 It's generally less understood and less researched and we're working with other projects who

01:41 are also working on this species around the UK and Europe to really facilitate and try

01:46 and accelerate learning about this species and how we can restore successfully at scale.

01:50 Zostra noltei, our dwarf seagrass species that we find intertidally, so it's exposed

01:56 at low tide, that creates meadows like other seagrass species and forms a lot of the same

02:02 functions around fish nursery ground, but it also is an incredibly important feeding

02:06 ground for a lot of overwintering birds like the Brent geese that come to this area and

02:10 we see a lot of around the Thames estuary area.

02:13 I'm Werner Grigg, I'm a project officer in conservation and policy at ZSL.

02:17 Today we are trialling a seed-based seagrass restoration method, it's called direct injector

02:21 seeding and we're going to start planting out some seagrass seeds that we picked earlier

02:26 in the summer to see if this is a technique that could scale up seagrass restoration.

02:29 This work's important today because we're trialling this as a technique to use in seagrass

02:33 restoration in the Thames, so if this is a technique that can work we hope to then use

02:37 it to scale up our seagrass restoration in the Thames.

02:40 So this work relates to previous work we did in the summer where we were looking at transplants

02:45 as a technique for seagrass restoration, so we're going to compare our seed-based restoration

02:49 techniques to the transplant restoration techniques to see what works.

02:52 In order to restore seagrass we really need to look at what disturbance there is on seagrass

02:56 already, we also need to know where it is, we need to map it and get good baseline data

03:00 on its condition and we need to trial different restoration techniques and working together

03:04 with other projects working on this species we can really come together and share our

03:07 knowledge to get these marine ecosystems back into the Thames estuary.

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