Crowdfunding Innovating Seagrass Restoration: The Underwater Seed Harvester Project

Oftentimes when we protect the planet and we start to look at the ocean and restore habitats and protect habitats, there are a lot of challenges that come in that way. And oftentimes we have to automate things to make sure that we can do things more

efficiently and quicker. Today is one of those times where we are looking at a project from Project Seagrass to have a seed harvester to help gather seeds from seagrass meadows and be able to help use those seeds to restore in other places because there are a lot of seagrass habitats to this day that are still being degraded and we need to restore them. As many of you know, seagrass habitats are extremely important coastal habitats. They

contribute to biodiversity. They're one of the most biodiverse habitats on the planet, as well as our security of our coastline and they're great blue carbon habitat, meaning that they sequester carbon So it's great in the fight against climate change. So it's always important to save these and protect these seagrass habitats. And Project Seagrass is here to do that. And they came on the podcast. I asked them on the podcast because I saw they're doing a crowd funder for this technology

to help better restore seagrass habitats. They want to create and build a seed harvester for seagrasses. And I think it was important to help them with their crowd funder. So I thought I'd have... Dr. Richard Unsworth, who is the scientific officer, the chief scientific officer for Seagrass, Project Seagrass, on the podcast to discuss this project and this crowdfunder so that you can get more information. And if

you feel comfortable and you're able to, I recommend you donate. I'm gonna be donating as well, so I recommend that you donate to this project. But here is the episode on the seed harvester. Enjoy the episode. Let's start the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is a podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean, and what you can do to live

for a better ocean by taking action. Now on today's episode, we have a very special one because we don't get to do this all the time. One of the things that I did want to do when I started this podcast was be able to help people complete their projects and be able to communicate those projects. And with Project Seagrass, since the get-go, I've always wanted to be involved in helping them spread the word because they've done such a great job at I'm going the

sea. Please go to the link in the show notes or in the description depending on where you're watching this or listening to this and feel free to donate. They have about 10 days left as of this posting this recording and it's really important that you do. So I appreciate anybody who does this. Here's the interview with Dr. Richard Unsworth talking about the underwater seed harvester to restore seagrasses. Enjoy and we'll

talk to you after. Hey Richard, welcome to the How to Protect the Ocean Yes, always happy to talk seagrass and lovely to be back on this show. We chatted a few years ago and it's nice to catch up again to talk about Absolutely. I can't wait to talk about this project. We're going to be talking about a crowdfunding project that Project Seagrass is putting on. It is called Underwater Sea Harvester to restore seagrass. This is something that's pretty

innovative. Has there been anything like this that you've seen before? Well, yes, there has, to be honest. We didn't lead the way here. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science actually led the way with something like this 20 years ago. They built a sort of a prototype system where they were working in very, very sheltered and consistently shallow habitats.

And they were able to do something with a little bit more of a sort of a more simple mechanism and We couldn't we couldn't facilitate that so because we're working slightly different less stable Very nice. I love that. I love that. We're going to talk more about the Project Seagrass, this project about seagrass, of course. And I can't wait to do that. But why don't we just step back

a little bit? I just want people, I just want to remind people of what So I'm Richard Unsworth, associate professor at Swansea University, but I'm also the chief science officer for Project Seagrass. So Project Seagrass is the the only internationally focused charity that's completely dedicated to saving the world's seagrass. That's all we do. We do research, we do conservation with that broader aim of trying to conserve and

It's amazing. And the work that you guys have done has been absolutely amazing. You continue to lead. I feel like a lot of the innovative, like, I guess that the initiatives that are going around with Seagrass, I mean, we've had a part, a lot of your team on the broadcast in the past to talk about mapping seagrass and sort of working at workshops with seagrass. And it's been absolutely amazing to see the progress of the organization just growing and building. And I just, I love seeing that.

So super happy to have you back to be able to talk about another incredible project. So where did this, so the idea I guess came from this initial prototype, but where did it build off from?

Like why did you guys decide, hey, this is something that we can build upon Let's try putting ourselves in the tech world a little bit and As it stands, each year we and other organizations send lots of people out into the shallow waters around Europe, America, other places around the world, collecting seagrass seeds. These CRS seeds are not like, you're not picking individual seeds, but you're picking a spade of seeds. Think of something a bit more analogous to a

group of seeds on a stem of wheat. So we're picking those reproductive shoots containing those spades from CRS meadows and in shallow waters for replanting this vital habitat. And sometimes that's people wading in shallow water. Sometimes it's people snorkeling. Sometimes it's people diving. But the reality here is that it's hard work. There's a lot of effort that goes into collecting these seeds. Managing

people is a lot of work. But we're fortunate enough to have a lot of volunteers and people who want to come and help and get involved with that. But still, it means that. Improving seagrass restoration, making it bigger is very much dependent upon how many people you can get involved in. You know, there are limitations around that sometimes in terms of safety, in terms of

other factors playing into it. So to actually think bigger, we needed to to find a way that we could collect these seeds in a more automated mechanized manner and obviously the idea of taking some sort of glorified lawnmower to some seagrass to collect some seagrass seeds is quite a horrific idea but that's what we're talking about here and we looked at the system that had been developed in Virginia and We spoke with the regulators in Wales, in the UK, about developing something on

us. And unsurprisingly, they were pretty much horrified at the idea of us taking a cutting device to seagrass. On one hand, we're saying we need to protect seagrass. And on the other hand, we're saying, oh, can we take a little moment to it? So there's a bit of a mismatch there, shall we say. But what we were actually advocating for is having a, not a lawnmower that cuts the seagrass to really short, but

something that basically just gives the seagrass a haircut. And that haircut is a sort of 20 centimeter

depth, the length of seagrass. And the idea here is that particular parts of the summer period, you get a huge bloom of Of these seeds being produced by by seagrass and at particular time Of that period they'll be floating up into the water column sticking pride proudly out and at that point in time if you can Basically give the the seagrass a haircut at a particular height Then you'll collect a huge amount of these of these seagrass seeds But there is this this sort of fear of impacting

the seagrass. So we had a bit of a step back and what we did is we developed a very sort of basic prototype, shall we call it, of a cutting machine and we developed with the regulator in Wales, Natural Resources Wales, together with them we developed a whole experimental project of like how we could determine whether this thing was going to impact the seagrass or not. So we had a whole load of transects lines under the water that we set up that were permanently marked.

And we had divers going along some of these with a pair of shears, cutting the seagrass. We had somewhere, we had this sled, this prototype, which was cutting, didn't operate very well, but it operated enough that we could tow it for 20 meters and cut some seagrass. We compared these different trials against the abundance of natural seagrass that hadn't been impacted. And so we run that program for a couple of years, did it repeat. And what we saw is that there is no impact of that cutter

because basically we're just giving it a haircut. And in some ways, you know, that might be a surprise, but in other ways not, because seagrasses all around the world, whether you talk about them in the tropics or you're talking about them in temperate climes, They're grazed. Animals

like to eat seagrass. Of course. So we have Brent geese in the temperate realm and some of our colleagues who work on the Isle of Wight were recently down there and they witnessed lots of swans grazing, chomping away all afternoon at the seagrass. In the tropics we see dugongs, we see turtles, there's some types of fish. So it's not really a surprise that if you chop the seagrass it grows back. And we're not digging up the rhizomes or the roots. We're just basically cutting the shoots to a

reduced height. And what we saw is that there is no impact. The seagrass remains healthy. It's doing very well. And when you compare that seagrass against natural populations that haven't been impacted, there is no difference. So it's great to see that and we've just recently written up all that information into an academic paper because we thought it was a key point to be able to prove that what we're doing is not impacting the

seagrass. So we're in this situation, we've got a a prototype that it worked a bit, but enough to run the trial. We now had greater assurance that if we did this, we're not going to impact the seagrass. The regulators are beginning to understand that. We're able to get a bit more permission to use a system at larger scale. We just need that system. And that's Yeah, great project. I would imagine the cutting of the seagrass would almost be a bit of like a pruning in a garden, right?

Where you're just pruning, you want it to grow back. What are the rates, and I know it's probably different for each species of seagrass, but what are the rates of growth? Do they grow back fairly quickly when you did that study year over year? Did you find like the

The following year there was no difference. Yeah, and and it was even even after we'd cut it was quite difficult to actually see some of the impacts because As we were had taking a blade over the seagrass a lot of the seagrass has also been pushed down So we didn't cut it all And so you actually you don't tend to cease even that much of an impact but but you know new shoots pop up every, every few weeks, you know, um, you'll get like in the height of summer, they'll be growing, uh,

very rapidly, you know, uh, over a few weeks period, you're going to get three, four centimeters of growth on a, on a shoot. So it's like, you know, really, really rapid turnover. So, um, cuts it. And, you know, so long as you're not damaging the actual root, the rhizome that's underpinning it, then Fantastic. Now, for the seeds that you do collect, and whether it's by humans harvesting them or the seed So at Project Seagrass, we have a whole range of

programs around the UK. Some of those are very applied restoration, where we're trying to actually conduct large-scale restoration. Some of them are very experimental, where we're trying to learn about some of the intricacies in the ways we replant seagrass. But broadly, all that seed is being used to bring back these habitats, because whether it's in the UK, whether it's in Indonesia, whether it's in Japan, wherever around the

world, we have seen huge amounts of seagrass loss. Seagrass is often referred to as the canary in the coal mine. or the canary in the ocean, really, that where we've lost seagrass, it's really an indicator of the quality of the environment that it's living in. And unfortunately, we've degraded our coasts all

around the world. And we continue to do this. It's not it's not like a just a historic thing and there was a lot of historic loss But it's something that is going we continue to see it There you know obviously I work in in the UK for a lot of my my time and So there's a lot of focus there, but we you know we see Harbors estuaries where seagrass is declining because of poor water quality but what we're now doing is we're trying to bring back seabass in places where the

environment has improved. So there's lots of places where you know it disappeared a long time ago or you know the environments have changed in lots of places so just because it was damaged here doesn't mean we can't plant it over there if the environment is right for it now. So we're trying to to replant these these habitats bring them back so they can form important fish habitats, support biodiversity, support climate change, all sorts of different factors

Yeah, for sure. And which is all admirable. We need seagrass for a lot of different reasons. As we've heard from Project Seagrass before, looking at biodiversity, it's a huge biodiversity haven for a lot of different species. It's blue carbon habitats as well being used for that. It's good for coastal security, as well as feeding other habitats and whatnot. Seagrass is probably one of the most important habitats that we see all over the world, like you mentioned before, temperate and tropical

areas. And they definitely need a lot of protection. Because we don't see them all the time, we don't recognize that they're being disturbed quite a bit and basically Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Now, with this, how much do you anticipate this seagrass harvester to collect? How many seeds in a day or in a pass? Have you guys had the chance to calculate that What we do know is that in a healthy seagrass meadow, sometimes you have anywhere between 100 and 10,000 seeds per

meter square. Right, right. So I think the 10,000 is more at the extreme end. And that's from data in your neck of the woods where people have, the sea grass tends to grow a bit bigger and a bit thicker, and it's got a huge production of seeds. But we're typically finding over a thousand seeds per meter squared in the UK. And that means that if we're pulling it over, you know, 100 meters squared, then suddenly,

actually, we're getting a lot of seeds. If we take it over bigger areas, then maybe we're picking up millions of seeds. Obviously, there's other factors coming into play here. There's other uses of those environments. Also, we need to be mindful of how we ensure that we don't cut up a lot of fish or different

other animals. and but you know there's lots of ways we can do that but I think that broadly we should be able to collect millions of seeds in a quite rapid manner and you know when you're talking about meadows that are sort of you know over 100 hectares in size and you know doing this over a number of transects it's actually a very small proportion of the area because you're not going to actually take a cut to a whole meadow, you're going to put it over a small

area of that meadow and ultimately take Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's that that's important for for people to know because these metals are huge that when you're when you're in them, and I think that's that's that's really important to reiterate so You know, it's it's really great to think that you know, obviously this this device will be able to collect so much more so many more seeds Especially when you look at compared to if you have volunteers out grabbing those seeds as well plus

a lot less of a disturbance when you have one You know, one machine than snorkelers or what have you, people going through the meadows. How is this device used? Is it like by remote control or is it towed behind a vessel or Yes, it's towed behind a vessel at a sort of half a knot to one knot maximum

speed. We've done similar things where we've got other types of sleds that we pull behind a boat and sometimes what we actually do is we attach the boat to a mooring or anchor it and basically we winch the boat slowly into that anchor so we've got a very controlled speed. Because that's the challenge is that if you put the throttle slightly down, you can kind of just sort of jump it a bit. So the idea of using a sort of an anchor point is

a better way of doing it. And then you can just have a very, very slow winching sort Yes, more of that constant movement across the metal. That's great. That's great to see. It's interesting, too, because you don't think about these things a lot of times when you're planning it. You have to be out in the field, and you have to know how to work it, and you have to know how it would react to the vessel. how it would react to an anchor point, and explore these

different aspects. How long, with the prototype that you had, as rough as it was, how long did it take you to figure these things out? How many times were you, I Yes, and I guess the first time we actually trialed this, it wasn't just the fact that we were putting a This crazy sled into the water for the first time, but we're actually we had a some funding to buy a brand new boat and It's always very good for working in shallow waters, but where actually it's

sort of when you get a bit of wind, it becomes a bit of a sail. So there was lots of trials and tribulations along the way, shall we say. We had some lessons learned. We got there in the end, but it's, yeah. With all these sorts of things, if you You want to develop something new, you've got to be willing to Absolutely. Patience is definitely a virtue when it comes to

creating something new like this. What's interesting is I haven't seen anything like, you guys have done some pretty interesting things at Project Seagrass, putting the mapping platform together and so forth. What made you decide to take on this project in itself with a prototype?

I mean, does it require, like, did you have somebody who's like has an engineering background or, you know, was this Well, it came out of a project that we were running in another part of Wales, in Milford Haven, where we planted a lot of seagrass, used a lot of volunteers. And we were working quite closely with the charity WWF. All right. And they were sort of they'd been involved with it. And one of their funding officers was actually quite a character and

a guy called Jim Nichols. He he came out with us and it was like, well, you know, this is this is this is hard work, all this hard graft. Like maybe we could get some funding to to have a project that's mechanized particular elements because this isn't the only bit of this story that's we've been trying to to mechanize but by a long road so we developed a project proposal with with him and something called the Garfield Western Foundation. They were great in supporting a project to develop

that pilot concept. And we also played with other things, building some sleds to pump seeds into the sediment, building some aquaria that was like, which allows us to process the seeds because once you collect them, There's other laborious jobs that go with that. So we had some funding to do all these different things, and that's why we sort of started developing these ideas of how can we mechanize this. And so we're able to run that project where we worked with the regulators to

do all that testing and to develop that pilot. But we're now at the point where we've demonstrated that That's amazing. It's got to be quite exciting to come to this point after all those years of putting this together and thinking about this and fidgeting around with how to tell it and what it should look like and how to design it. You know, as I look at the website for the crowd funder. You're close. You're very

close to the goal, to your goal. And we're in about the last week, week and a half, probably the last week proper to be able to get this funding. Once you get this funding, and we're going to say when because I'm confident that you'll get it because I know a lot of people in our audience would love to be a part of seeing this story develop as a micro-funder and so forth. What's the plan once the funding happens? You're going to go out So we've been working with a company

called Tandem Ventures. They're a bit of a quirky group of people who do all sorts of things from building jetpacks, to design a range of kits. So they're engineers, they're people with those natural skills to build and engineer things. So the aim is to then, you know, deliver and try to actually pull this design together and then actually then next summer ultimately test it. And that's the key part

there is to be able to test it next year. I guess the crowd funder is the minimal point of what we're hoping for and it would be great if we were able to raise a bit more so we can do a bit more next summer. But the key thing is to get a truly operating piece of kit that is no longer at a prototype

level and we can actually roll that out. The person who's been heading up this project within our team, Sam Rees, he's been working with Tandem and developing ideas and that's why we've got to this point that we can actually try and go for this crowdfunder and try and really run it out because Sam has been playing with all these different bits of kit It's like we've learned each different stage and now we just needed someone with the technical know-how to turn those concepts,

ideas, and learning into something that is That's amazing. That's awesome. Now once this is built, Is there another study that's going to be done year over year to compare with the original prototype and to see the differences and obviously sort of go through some iterations to make this new prototype Yes, that's the need to hopefully go beyond the crowd funders is the target so we can actually do a lot more of that comparisons we can

deliver with it. There will be fine tuning even when you have an operational piece of equipment. How we pull it and all the different things that will come up. To be able to pull a tow over a long distance we would need to do assessment work on that first so we don't ram it over a rock. So

we have to do bits and pieces like that. But that's the broader aim is to be able to refine it and work with it and then use it in other places and that's important because there's other jurisdictions just within the UK where some of the regulators are a little more suspicious than others and a little more embracing. So there's some room for trying to work with

those guys. But there's other researchers around Europe, about North America, other parts of the world who might be interested to have a go and use something like this. So who knows where it'll go. Our broader aim as an organization is to save the world's seagrass, but that's something that's a very long-term goal, and

that's something that we don't do alone. That's about partnerships, it's about working with organizations all around the world, and if we can develop knowledge and equipment and things that other people can run with, then that's what we want. So if someone uses something like Absolutely. That was going to be one of my questions. There was an ROV that was developed a number of years ago and it was by a company called Open ROV. They made it small and

they made it compact and they made it essentially that anybody can buy. I think it was like $1,000 or $1,500. There was also an option to build it yourself and so it was like a DIY kit for like $600 or $700. And then at one point, somebody backed it. And James Cameron actually backed it and said, hey, I'm going to buy 1,000 of these and you can give it to all these different organizations so that they can also use it and they can gain access to it and use it for conservation

projects. is, I know that we're in the very beginning stages of this prototype trying to get it funding and built, you know, so that it's usable. But is that the idea going

forward? You know, as you mentioned, you know, if somebody in Japan wants to do it, or somebody Indonesia wants to use something very similar to that, is that the in the future plans of saying if we can make this really compact and make it easy to either build or use by other people, this is something that could be commercialized and shared with a lot of other I don't think we'd want to commercialize it per se, because I don't think that, Yeah. Ourselves. But, you know, if

we could share it with others, then yes, absolutely. And one of our big things is about knowledge sharing. And, you know, it's important that as scientists, you write things up, you share it and it doesn't matter sometimes whether that's a success or a failure, you need to share it and we'd love to be able to give it to others. It won't be a global tool because seagrasses in some parts of the world don't grow in the same way that you can collect

the seeds in this manner. So a lot of the tropical seagrasses don't produce seed in the same way, so it wouldn't necessarily equate. both northern and southern temperate regions, there's a lot of sea grass where they're growing in a similar way. So I think there's opportunities there for sure. Great. And Zostra marina, known as eelgrass, which is what we're focusing it on, is Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty prolific around the world. Yeah.

Very nice, very nice. Now I have to, I have to ask, I mean, this is, I know this project is a serious project you've been working on for quite some time, but

you're at this stage. How excited are you and the team to Oh we're stoked, it's an exciting project, it's really nice to know that people want to support us and you know I think in running a charity it's like, it's amazing how people come to the fore and want to support you and people, you know, all sorts of different walks of life and different sort of scenarios. whether they're wealthy or not.

We get all sorts of different donors and it's amazing to see how people will support the work that you're doing because I think there's a lot of eco-anxiety out there as well. There's a lot of people wanting to do something and in some walks of life people can do things and change change things, but in others they can't. Actually supporting a charitable organization to do something like this is a

nice thing. It's something to never assume you deserve as a charity, but it's lovely to see it, where people are actually giving their hard-earned money to support an activity that can improve the status of Yeah, absolutely. And I'll be honest, I think it's a testament to your team in the work that you've done in the past as well as continue to do and be very transparent of the work that you've been able to do. Not only do you have a great comms team, but you have people on the team that love

Seagrass, love to share their work on Seagrass and their thoughts. And I think that's really helped gather you know, more eyes on the work that you're doing, and it's showing already in this part. There's still quite a ways to go, you know, and there's 11 days left as of this recording, and I think we're going to be publishing

when there's 10 days left. So I, you know, I want to tell people, like, I've got a lot of people who are like, hey, you know, I don't have a lot of money to donate to large, large projects, but this is a way, the crowdfunding for things like this is a way that you can donate little bits and bits, and it'll go towards a larger project that can help restore seagrasses in the future. I think this is an investment that's definitely worthwhile, and

I know I'm gonna be donating, and I'm looking forward to doing that. And when I saw this project, I was like, oh, we gotta have somebody from the team on to be able to talk about this and to be able to help just push it over. September Yep, that's the end date. I would love to have people's support. It's hugely appreciated. We're aware that it's never easy to give hard-earned funds away, but it's hugely appreciated when

Yeah, absolutely. I've done episodes before on eco-anxiety, climate anxiety, and this is part of how you can help and how you can ease off some of that anxiety. There are people out there that are doing some great work and doing their best to help with the planet, help with the environment, and restore seagrass as part of that. As I mentioned at the beginning, it's great as a habitat for biodiversity. as well as a blue carbon habitat to help sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. And so this

is going to be an important investment into our future. So I highly recommend people to donate. So to do that, I'm going to put a link in the show notes and people can go over and donate. Do this soon. Don't wait. And even if you see they're getting close to the goal, as Richard said, If they go over, that's okay, because they'll use those funds for more studies and

so forth. So don't worry about just getting to the goal. Just donate what you can and what you're able to afford, and let's see this thing get going, and I'm looking forward to seeing its progress. So Richard, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode. We really appreciate the work that you and your team continue to do, and we look forward to having Thank you very much for having me, and it's lovely to catch

up. hear your podcasts which are always an interesting addition Thank you, we really appreciate it. Thank you Richard for joining us today. on the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I really appreciate you coming on, explaining why we need a seed harvester, why it's important, how much more efficient it will be, how many more seeds it will collect, and what we need to do, and sort of the call to action of why we need to protect and restore seagrasses, not just in the UK,

not just in Canada, not just in the US, but all over the world. And I really appreciate the work that Project Searest have done. You and your team have been fantastic. And this crowdfunder at this point is 71% funded at this point of this recording. And I'm hoping it'll be funded for like beyond 100%. And I hope we are a part of

that as an audience. And so, you know, a lot of people that I've had, that I've engaged with in this audience have said, hey, you know, if there's a way that we can be part of projects or be able to contribute to projects, we would love to do that. This is one of those ways. And so I highly recommend that you go to the link in the show notes as well, or in the description if you're watching this on YouTube, and feel free to donate whatever you can. There's different amounts. There's incentives

for different amounts, but we really appreciate anything that you can donate. Go over to the show notes as well as in the description if you're watching this on YouTube. And I want to thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Thank you so much for your donation if you decide to donate, if you can

donate, and just listening. I really appreciate you just listening to this. And if you know people who are interested in this kind of stuff, just share it around and maybe they will donate as well and support this project. So thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk