AUTOMATION OF SEAGRASS PLANTING

Automation of seagrass planting. Earth Change, a division of the Land & Water Group, alongside Project Seagrass and Swansea University, unveil ground-breaking automated seagrass planter, revolutionising large-scale seagrass planting.

Land & Water, a leading environmental engineering company, and Project Seagrass, a renowned marine conservation organisation, are proud to announce the successful design, construction, and testing of an innovative Automated Seagrass Planter (ASP) patent pending. This ground-breaking technology promises to revolutionise the large-scale planting of seagrass, offering new hope for the restoration and preservation of these vital coastal ecosystems. “We are now convinced we can substantially scale up seagrass glade restoration using the automated planter, taking conventional planting (done with divers on an individual seedling basis) to sea-scape scale planting at 1000’s of plants per day” says James Maclean, CEO of Land & Water.

Seagrass meadows play a crucial role in maintaining healthy marine environments, fostering biodiversity, and mitigating climate change by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Globally, seagrass has the capability to capture carbon faster than tropical rainforests, accounting for 10 to 18% of total ocean carbon storage, despite covering less than 0.1% of the seafloor [source: Duarte et al., 2005b; Kennedy et al., 2010]. However, due to various human activities and natural disturbances, seagrass habitats have been rapidly declining worldwide. In the UK alone seagrass depletion since 1936 EXCEEDS 30% of the areas of previous colonisation.

Recognising the urgency to restore these critical ecosystems, Land & Water partnered with Project Seagrass and Swansea University to develop a cutting-edge solution. The Automated Seagrass Planter developed by this dynamic collaboration represents a significant breakthrough in seagrass restoration efforts, aligning the use of biodegradable seedpods/hessian sacks developed by Project Seagrass with the installation innovation from Land & Water. This innovative device streamlines and automates the process of seagrass planting, making large-scale restoration projects more efficient and achievable than ever before.

Key features and benefits of the Automated Seagrass Planter include:

1. Precision Planting: The ASP employs advanced technology to accurately place hessian sacks filled with sand and seeds in pre-assessed locations, ensuring optimal growth conditions and maximising survival rates.
2. It can work in subtidal and intertidal areas in water depths of up to 6metres.
3. Efficient Operation: The automated system significantly reduces the time and effort required for manual planting, enabling the execution of large-scale projects in a cost-effective and timely manner.
4. Environmental Considerations: The ASP is designed to minimise environmental impact during the planting process. It ensures optimal spacing of seagrass plugs, reducing competition for resources and promoting healthy growth and global positioning technology to record the mosaic of juvenile habitats planted.
5. Adaptability: The ASP can be easily adjusted to accommodate various seagrass species and local conditions, providing flexibility for restoration projects in diverse coastal environments.

The successful testing of the Automated Seagrass Planter has yielded promising planting results, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing seagrass restoration efforts. By enabling the rapid planting of seagrass at scale, this technology has the potential to rejuvenate degraded habitats, enhance coastal resilience, promote marine biodiversity, and provide substantial new habitats for carbon sequestration.

Trial planting regimes will be subject to ongoing monitoring by Project Seagrass to validate the effectiveness of the new planting regime. “We are excited by the planting results, and we must now see how this method of planting works in Dale” says Richard Unsworth, Associate Professor Swansea University.

Earth Change and Project Seagrass are committed to collaborating with governments, environmental agencies, research institutions, and coastal communities to deploy the Automated Seagrass Planter in large-scale restoration initiatives worldwide. Through these partnerships, they aim to create a positive and lasting impact on the health and sustainability of our marine ecosystems.

About Land & Water

Land & Water Group is an environmental engineering company specialising in waterway maintenance, dredging, and ecological restoration. With a deep commitment to sustainability, Land & Water provides innovative solutions for preserving and enhancing natural habitats and promoting environmental stewardship.

About Project Seagrass

Project Seagrass is a leading marine conservation organisation dedicated to the conservation and restoration of seagrass ecosystems. Through community, research and action, Project Seagrass strives to raise awareness about the importance of seagrass and work towards its protection for future generations.

 For enquiries, please contact:

Earth Change/Land & Water

Tom Godfrey – Tom@earthchange.co.uk – 07974 927878

Project Seagrass

Bethan Thomas <bethan@projectseagrass.org

Other Information

 Background

We found that at least 44% of the UK’s seagrass has been lost since 1936 – most of it since the 1980s. But when we modelled which coastal areas were likely to have been suitable for seagrass, we found that as much as 92% of it might have disappeared. PhD Candidate Alix Green and Dr Peter Jones (both UCL Geography)

The task of restoration of saltmarsh is enormous and made more difficult in temperate parts of the world as light quality is vital to the growth of seagrass. Most of the planting of seagrass is done by hand in the UK – by hand at low tide or by divers at a high cost and low output.

Opportunity

To automate the planting process of seagrass to enable more than 2,000 hessian sacks a day to be planted in exact locations and to exact depths in tidal waters from 2m to 6m deep.

The Team

The Seagrass Ocean Rescue Upscaling Project led by Project Seagrass and Swansea University  are pioneers of the use of science based solutions to improve the capacity of restoring seagrasses and Land & Water, an Environmental EPC, driven by a passion to innovate and deliver more efficient automated processes across land & Water which include, the long reach and amphibious excavator, low turbidity dredging buckets, silt pushers, the saltmarsh restoration drag-box and many more inventions.

How the trial was executed

Project Seagrass identified a site in Dale Bay, Pembrokeshire where they have been successfully planting seagrass by hand to date. Together with Land & Water, a trial was conducted in Dale Bay during June 2023 to test a scalable prototype capable of planting 2,000 bags in a day.

The positioning of each plate on the seabed will be predetermined by Project Seagrass and will be guided by GPS coastal systems to enable placement in a predetermined formation (grid) on the sea floor to help promote optimum propagation.

Method

• The bags are placed into the ASP on the deck of the multicat.
• The ASP is lifted off the deck then swung out over the side and lowered onto the seabed.
• The bags are then planted on the seabed.
• The ASP is then lifted back onto the deck and the process repeated.

What are the advantages of this approach over manual planting?

The plate approach will be a much less invasive method than planting seagrass by hand/by diver.

• As we plant the 64 hessian sacks at the same time we will make 64 small holes and then have the machine carefully cover the bags. This will avoid the diver creating the holes by hand and having to stand on the bottom – leave their sack of hessian seeds on the seabed etc.
• The whole process will be at least 4x as fast so the seabed will be disturbed for a shorter period.
• The process will be more precise which should help the seagrass better take and colonise.

Monitoring

Project Seagrass and Swansea University will monitor the trial on an ongoing basis to validate the effectiveness of the new planting regime.