Seagrass Ocean Rescue

We would like to share an update on the Seagrass Ocean Rescue North Wales project. After planting seagrass seeds at Y Gamlas and Penychain in February and April, we went back into the field at the start of June to see how the seagrass is doing. We were excited to find that many seeds have turned into seedlings at both locations, with the highest number of seedlings at Y Gamlas. These results give us an initial indication that the sites are ecologically suitable for seagrass to grow, which is excellent news. As we also planted seagrass seeds using different methods, we will conduct an in-depth analysis to see what worked best, as this will guide our future planting efforts. In the months to come, we will go back and monitor the seedlings again to see how well they fare over the summer, and whether they survive through the winter. But for now, we are very pleased with how they are doing.

The next step is to collect seagrass seeds at Porthdinllaen during 30^th July – 11^th August. If you would like to stop by and see our work in action, you are more than welcome to do so. Furthermore, we have volunteering opportunities coming up – please email volunteers@projectseagrass.org if you would like more information.

If you have any questions, please get in touch - we would love to hear from you.

Pen Llŷn a’r Sarnau SAC: Alison Palmer Hargrave (alisonpalmerhargrave@gwynedd.llyw.cymru)

North Wales Wildlife Trust: Nia Jones (Nia.Jones@northwaleswildlifetrust.org.uk)

Project Seagrass: Flo Taylor (flo@projectseagrass.org)

Now that spring has come, we would like to share a brief update on the Seagrass Ocean Rescue project to restore seagrass in North Wales.

In February, we started the seagrass planting work and managed to plant 150,000 seagrass seeds on the south side of Pen Llŷn with the help of a team of volunteers - it was a great start to the project!

In April, we aim to plant another 50,000 seeds in the subtidal zone at Y Gamlas (also known as Carreg y Defaid) on Pen Llŷn during 14 and 15 April using SCUBA diving - see attached map. We already planted 50,000 seeds at Y Gamlas in February, yet that was higher on the shore.

Similarly to February, we will again plant small hessian bags filled with sand and seagrass seeds. Additionally, we will trial a new planting method, namely to put seeds inside small balls of natural clay and to bury these balls, which is a method that we previously trialed in our seagrass aquarium with promising results. It is the marine equivalent of seed bombs. Lastly, we will plant a few seagrass shoots that were raised in our aquarium in Swansea, which were grown from seeds collected at Porthdinllaen.

If you have any questions, please get in touch - we are happy to hear from you. Moreover, if you would like to visit us whilst we are in the field, we would be excited to meet you! In that case, please contact Project Seagrass.

As spring will soon be on our doorstep, we would like to share the upcoming plans of the Seagrass Ocean Rescue team to restore seagrass in North Wales. Furthermore, we wish to share with you our reasoning for selecting specific sites to start the restoration work.

Following extensive stakeholder engagement and ecological research a total of seven sites have been selected for further consideration, six on Pen Llŷn and one on Anglesey.

These sites have been selected after receiving input from local stakeholders and biological considerations. These include direct feedback from stakeholders via face-to-face discussions and online workshops, ecological knowledge provided by local community members, and discussions with relevant groups, organisations and site managers. We have also used information from our scientific surveys of the sites’ ecological conditions, scientific computer models that predict where seagrass could theoretically grow, and seagrass planting experiments in early 2022. 

At the end of January, we undertook further site assessments to identify the best locations to start planting seagrass in February; we assessed sites by looking at e.g. the presence of living animals, algae, the types of habitats, sediment types, and the morphology of the coast. Based on these results, we will start planting seagrass seeds at three small plots: two at Pen-Ychain 1, and one at Y Gamlas.

After planting seagrass seeds in February, we will monitor the sites to see whether seagrass grows and establishes. Later this year, we hope to also plant mature plants in the field for the first time, which originate either from healthy meadows nearby, or from the Project Seagrass seagrass nursery in Carmarthenshire.

Overall, during 2023 we will focus our efforts on Pen Llŷn, which eases the logistics of our activities. In 2024, we will start planting seagrass on Anglesey, likely at Traeth Yr Ora.

When restoring seagrass ecosystems, it is essential to learn from your restoration activities and experiences, to integrate input from stakeholders, and to adapt and optimise the restoration strategy accordingly to successfully restore the seagrass. That is why, depending on the results of this year’s planting activities on Pen Llŷn, we may (i) increase our planting efforts at these sites in 2024 and later years, (ii) attempt seagrass restoration at one or multiple of the other sites, or (iii) continue our planting efforts at these sites and include other sites.

In total, we want to plant 10 hectares of seagrass across North Wales. However, the selected sites add up to more than 10 hectares. That is an important part of our approach to restoration: the selected sites are so-called seagrass search areas. They are larger than 10 hectares in total, because this approach gives us flexibility to find specific locations in these seagrass search areas where we have (i) the support of local communities to restore seagrass and (ii) ecological conditions that are suitable for seagrass to grow. Depending on ecological conditions and the support of local communities, this may mean that we end up planting at one, a few, or at all sites. Our coasts and seas are much less well known than the land, which requires us to be flexible in finding the right locations for seagrass restoration.

We hope that this provides you with an overview of the upcoming activities. If you have any questions, feedback, input, suggestions, or anything else, we will be happy to hear from you. You can reach us by contacting reece.halstead@northwaleswildlifetrust.org.uk