Native oyster and seagrass restoration - Scotland
Seawilding - a community-led native oyster and seagrass restoration project
Seawilding, based at Loch Craignish, Argyll is the UK's first community-led native oyster and seagrass restoration project. Their aim is to restore lost biodiversity, sequester carbon, and create green jobs. They are pioneering low-cost, best-practice marine habitat restoration methodologies and empowering other coastal communities to do the same.
Action feed
Counting seagrass shoots per quadrant.
Expansion of seagrass clump planted at the start of the season.
Aerial view of workers tending to an oyster nursery.
Interns surveying oysters to monitor growth, survival and density rates
Volunteers helping with seagrass transplanting
Working with communities
2024 seagrass seed harvest done! 🤿👊🏼 This year we harvested around 200,000 seeds with the help of loads of awesome volunteers from across the UK, Europe, and even as far afield as the US! We now wait for the seeds to ripen in our processing tanks after which they will be separated from the decomposing seed stems and stored in our chiller unit to await planting next spring 🌱🌱🌱
Great Seagrass Survey 2023: The results are in and volunteers from across the UK recorded an astounding 185 hectares of unmapped seagrass meadows over the summer of 2023. That’s almost the size of Monaco! 🌱🌱
Here’s what 100 oysters per square meter looks like. This intrepid band of one hundred are all marked up as part of one of our science projects to learn more about native oyster restoration in Loch Craignish.
Seagrass seed harvesting done! This year we have harvested around 125,000 seeds which we will use in further trials aimed at finding the most effective restoration methods. The stems are kept in processing tanks to allow the seeds to mature and the seeds then gathered from the bottom of the tanks, cleaned and kept in a chiller unit until we are ready to plant them. #NatureRestorationFund #naturescot #seagrassrestoration #seagrass #communityled
Native oyster and seagrass restoration - Scotland joined Pinwheel!