00:00A healthy Greater Thames estuary is really important because it's home to lots and lots
00:04of amazing wildlife. People don't realise it but we have two species of seahorse living in the Thames,
00:09we have five species of shark, we have porpoises and lots of other marine mammals and all these
00:14this wildlife call the Thames home and also use it for really important stages of their life.
00:19The Greater Thames estuary is one of Europe's most important wetlands and the reason it's so
00:24important to have it healthy is because it's so important to wildlife and people so it provides
00:30ecosystem services such as flood protection and mitigation and water purification to coastal
00:36communities as well as providing well-being benefits but most importantly to us it creates an
00:42amazing environment for wildlife at all different stages of its life. So we're here today to plant
00:46around a thousand seagrass plants here in Egypt Bay in the Greater Thames estuary and that's all
00:52part of kicking off our field work for transforming the Thames and really trying to turn the tide on
00:58the health of the Greater Thames estuary. Over the course of one week ZSL's conservationists
01:03collected nearly 1,000 cylindrical seagrass cores, tubes of mud extracted from the Thames,
01:10each one containing multiple individual dwarf eelgrass shoots from a seagrass meadow in Essex before
01:17carefully planting each one in mudflats in Kent. Transforming the Thames is a project led by ZSL but
01:24it's a partnership of organisations including environmental NGOs, industry, landowners
01:32and academics all working together to restore the coastal habitats in the Greater Thames estuary.
01:37Today we're making a start on our seagrass restoration but overall the Transforming the
01:42Thames project is focusing on six habitats. So recovering seagrass meadows in the Greater Thames
01:46estuary requires a lot of physical work so we spent a week out here this year. Half of that time
01:52has
01:52been in on the north side of the estuary in Essex at a site called Two Tree Island and that's
01:56been
01:56collecting cores, seagrass plants from a healthy what we call donor meadow. Those plants have then
02:02been taken to a site on the south side of the estuary called Egypt Bay in Kent. They've been planted
02:07in
02:07two different planting designs in two different planting densities so we can learn about what is
02:13the best method for restoration in this area and we then will continue to monitor them in the future
02:19in the hope that they they thrive and then establish a new meadow within the Greater Thames estuary.
02:23Seagrass is really important when lots of these plants grow together they form dense underwater meadows
02:28that can be really lush and thriving in our marine and coastal environment and that provides habitat for
02:33fish for invertebrates and it also traps sediments so that helps stabilise our shorelines. So what
02:37we're doing here today is about so much more than just seagrass planting we're also thinking about
02:41how we protect multiple habitats at a large scale and how we reduce the pressures on those habitats.
02:47By bringing all these different partners together the idea is that we can be greater than the sum of
02:52our parts and we can all work together to restore the health of this iconic river.
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