This is a golden kelp forest,
a mesmerizing and magical ecosystem that is home to all kinds of marine life.
And the term forest really encapsulates the essence of this place.
Because when you dive underneath the canopy of this aquatic jungle,
you uncover a whole new world.
A bustling, three dimensional habitat that acts as the cradle of the ocean
and offers a safe haven that shelters the young of many different species.
But unfortunately, many of these places have disappeared in the last 50 years
due to what we believed to have been a mix of pressures such as bottom
trawling for fishing and nutrient runoff from polluted rivers and drainage.
However, with cleaner rivers and tighter regulations on fishing, we believe there's
now an opportunity to try and bring back some of these forests.
Which is of course, why we've been hard at work
developing a project that can do this at scale.
This project has made a ton of progress in the past year,
so I'm really excited to share with you all the different updates.
And to do so properly.
We're going to have to go underwater so that I can show you the project area.
Everything that is living down there, all the amazing little creatures,
and of course, how our young kelp forest is developing.
But before we get into that, let's first take a look at how these forests work.
To understand them a bit better here along the Portuguese coastline,
we have six native species of forest forming macroalgae.
But in our area, the forests are mostly comprised of two species.
First, we have Saccorhiza polyschides, which has an interesting life strategy.
Its lifecycle is annual meaning it does all its growing in a few months
in spring and then releases its spores at the end of summer.
And at this point
the kelp dies and releases from the rock in the first autumn storms.
This accelerated life cycle allows it to be opportunistic
and quickly colonize bedrock when conditions are suitable.
Then we have Laminaria Ochroleuca, which is a perennial species
that can live for a few years.
This means that you can see it year round and it's a bit more predictable
to work with, which will become relevant later in this story.
The way you tell them apart, by the way, is at the base
Laminaria looks like it has roots while Saccorhiza has a wide foot.
Well, in case you wonder randomly into a Kelp forest,
you should be able to tell them apart.
Now, if you're a member or a long time viewer, you'll recall that
we worked with Sea Forester on a trial of the spore bag technique
where we collected the sori of the annual Saccorhiza kelp
and attached it to rocks at a new location to try and create a new forest there.
This technique ultimately failed to produce any meaningful results,
and well, this is actually really valuable data.
You see, often organizations don't share their failed tests,
but they should, of course, because it can inform others.
So right now, Tiago,
our biologist, managing this project, is working on aggregating data
from several partners and publishing a paper on this technique.
Under our conservation evidence partnership with the University
of Cambridge.
And since then we've shifted to using a new method called green gravel.
It's essentially growing kelp on rocks and then dumping them in the ocean.
But there's a bit more to it.
This technique was pioneered by the Institute of Marine Research
in Norway and has been successfully tested in quite a few places by now.
In Portugal, our partners at Sea Forester and Mare Polytechnic of Leiria
have tested this out with Laminaria Ochroleuca, the perennial species.
And they got some great initial results
when looking at the bigger picture of bringing back these kelp forests.
Stage one or testing is now complete.
We know that this idea works, which means that now we can
tackle stage two, which is a succession of larger experiments,
to see if we can achieve the desired results in a larger area.
And finally, if everything works out,
the third stage will be to go into mass production and mass restoration
to get the ball rolling on stage two, we built five modules which have the capacity
to produce 80 trays of green gravel with about 300 stones in each one.
The production cycle is around 3 to 4 months, and this year,
after a bit of tweaking, we've finally started our production.
The first step in this process was to collect the spores from a wild kelp
forest.
We focused on Laminaria Ochroleuca, the perennial species,
because with Saccorhiza, the batches would disappear each year
and reappear somewhere nearby or potentially somewhere further away.
And this would make it really hard and also really expensive to monitor.
The crew for this collection was Jan from Sea Forester, Alvaro from IPL and Tiago.
So we are here in Peniche and we are going to dive on a healthy kelp forests.
And the goal is to collect some reproductive material
that we can use to start the cultivation cycles at the kelp nursery.
The collection process was fairly simple Identify
the source of the kelp where the spores are stored and cuts that part of the blade
and then put it in the bag and take it out The amount we collected
does not harm the existing forest, but it will go a long way in our lab.
We just finished the dive now to collect some sori of material
in Peniche and we got quite a good harvest actually.
So we have 2
2 full mesh bags full of material now,
but you can see those sori patches where
now we will take this back to the lab, we will prepare
the blades and then they will be kept overnight.
And tomorrow we can do the spore release.
The spores are then extracted and over time they grow into gametophyte,
which we're able to keep in the lab in this phytochamber
with the right conditions
for the gametophytes to live, but not to start evolving into kelp.
And this means that we're able to keep them there for a really long time,
which is quite useful because we don't want to be going to a
wild kelp forest each time we want to start a new production cycle.
So once we have the gametophytes from the phytochamber,
that's the next step to start a production cycle
is to spray them onto the gravel.
And we have the gravel.
So these pebbles on each of these trays here
and we spray
them on onto the onto the rock and then the kelp attaches
and then all we have to do is provide them with the right conditions
for them to grow.
And so this means having moving water, which is what you can see here.
So these are the the circulating system of water
and then also having the right temperature.
So about 14, 15
degrees is what we're using and then also the right light conditions.
So here the light is controlled by a computer
which has a night and day cycle
and where the intensity changes over the growing cycle
to promote growth and to simulate
what they would find out in the ocean.
The most important feature that we're looking for in the new area is
for there to be plenty of reef structures so that the kelp can attach to it.
And this lovely rocky mazes are ideal for us.
But I have to point out this place is by no means devoid of life.
Here you'll find all kinds of fish species, some going about their life
relatively carefree, and others are more cautious and have evolved
to blend into their environment and disappear from sight.
Then there are these colorful sponges attached to the rock,
these rather chunky sea hares munching on the algae
and of course, a variety of beautiful nudibranchs.
They're these tiny, soft bodied marine gastro pod mollusks that
try to look very, very toxic to predators
with all their bright colors and flashy effects.
But at least to me and to my eyes, they only end up looking absolutely
fabulous.
My point is that there is already a living ecosystem down here,
but the return of the kelp and the shelter and food it
provides could help improve things significantly for all of these species,
but crucially, also for the ones that are not present in this reef.
You see, we dove on this project site the day after free
diving the healthy kelp forests.
And the difference was striking. In the kelp forests
there was so many baby fish and baby invertebrates that it was hard
to swim there without going through a little cloud of them.
While at our project sites, I never saw a single young fish.
And I think that tells you a fair bit about how these places help support
marine life populations.
We ended up choosing two rocky reefs as our project sites,
one here near Cascais and another one closer to the nursery.
And after about three months of growing, the young kelp was ready to deploy.
At this stage, once you get them out of the nursery,
it is really important to keep them cool and moist
and also to get the deployment done relatively fast.
For the first deployments near the nursery,
we used the old family car to get the stones to the harbor.
But later on when we were deploying near Cascais,
it was a bit of a long trip for them, so we rented a refrigerated van to help
keep the kelp cool on their two hour road trip down to the harbor in Cascais.
Yeah, so now we are just loading all the gravel onto the boat
so that we can take it out to the site, then deploy it.
So we we arrived here in Berlengas and now the next step
is to set up the perimeter where we will be deploying the gravel.
And so Alvaro is going in and getting these these buoys and creating
like a square, which is where we will be releasing them and dropping the pebbles.
We did this across all our deployments, adding
a new square to each area and marking it with GPS points.
Each square is 35 by 35 meters
or around 1225 square meters.
And while we don't cover the entire area in stones, it is really useful
having this limited range because it makes it much easier
to monitor the deployments and make sure that the results are clean.
And once the buoys are in place, it's finally time to deploy the kelp.
After all
the work building the nursery and caring for the kelp, it's
very cool to be here to finally see it
drop into the water.
The deployments went really well across the different locations,
and I think that this shot that Tiago got of the parachuting kelp
gravel is really exciting to see because it looks
and feels like a proper scalable solution,
a bit like carpet bombing the sea floor.
But in this case, with something really nice and positive
that will hopefully grow into a forest. And at the bottom
we could see that the stones were well spread over each of the areas.
So all we need to do now was wait for the results,
of course, while continuing the production of the next few batches.
Now, before we check on the results, I think it's important
to explain the funding structure for this project.
We've budgeted €88,551 for the project until the end of 2023,
with €22,250 being used
for the building of the modules in 2022
and €66,301
for the three production cycles planned for 2023.
The funding for this came from these lovely businesses right here
that supported this project directly and also from our amazing Mossy
Earth members,
which are a group of people that help fund our projects
with a monthly contribution.
And if you'd like to support our work, you can do so
by signing up at mossy.earth.
By becoming a member, you'll be funding dozens of different projects
to help bring back wilderness across a diversity of ecosystems.
We plant trees in Iceland, flood forests in the Danube, restore rivers in Scotland
so that salmon can thrive among many other such projects that have all sorts
of different angles on how to restore nature and there are also
quite a few really exciting ones in the pipeline, but more on that soon.
We report all of this to our members through regular updates.
Videos like this one, our Transparency dashboard,
field reports, project podcasts, and much, much more.
So if that sounds like something that you would like to support, then
please consider heading over to mossy.earth to learn more.
Now let's go look at this baby kelp forests.
Our deployments are staggered
as not every module started producing at the same time.
And this means that when it was time for the second deployment in Cascais
we could finally check on the development of the first batch.
I think their reactions tell you
everything you need to know about how much this means to the whole team.
And one month later I was back in the water with Tiago
to do some monitoring and to film this for you.
And the kelp was looking even better.
Look at all our lovely kelp.
It was so amazing to see so many stones had developed
and the newer batches were coming along nicely as well.
And we found some really nice results.
So some of them found kelp like this big, like seven centimeters or something.
So that's a really, really good sign.
And it's very exciting to see because this is also the place
where we've been trying to get some kelp to grow here for a long time
since we did that, the trial with the spore bag technique. So
these are very promising results.
So we need to keep the monitoring This is very, very exciting to see.
So what is the future for these experimental plots?
Well, this kelp faces an uphill battle.
I'm not going to lie to you.
Our hypothesis is that the conditions here are better now
than they were in the past.
But we don't necessarily have proof that they are
because we have no baseline data from 50 years ago.
We also picked a really tough summer to start these deployments
as sea temperatures have hit a record high this year.
And then there are also natural pressures such as herbivory.
Some of our kelps had big chunks bitten off
and the current pressure could be too much for a forest to easily develop.
Our strategy is to continue our deployments, to reinforce each site
and to try to reach a tipping point where we have a self-sustaining forest.
For now, there are still many stages to go and many questions to be answered.
Will the young kelp survive the summer?
Will it attach to the reef?
And when spring comes, will it start reproducing?
Together with our amazing partners at Mare IP Leiria and Sea Forester
we're on this journey for the long run and it seems that we now have a working tool
that we can continue improving to try to achieve this ultimate goal
of bringing back these amazing golden kelp forests.
I think we are right there
So close to the mass restoration
of these ecosystems that, yeah, it's just it's just a really exciting moment.
So a huge thank you to everyone who's contributed, who's been a member to
to get us to this points and to get this project to the stage that it's in.
And yeah, as usual, if you'd like to support this kind of work, then please
consider heading over to mossy.earth and becoming a member.
I can't say thank you enough. Until next time.
Cheers!