Seagrass is a hidden wonder.
Something everyone should know about.
It's a fantastic life giver, a haven for wildlife, protects our coastline.
It's an amazing climate mitigator.
You can find seagrasses all around the UK,
but these are only a sort of a fragment of what they used to be.
Ultimately we've lost probably over 90% of our seagrass.
Unless action is taken, there’s real risk that this will actually disappear forever.
This project is giving that little bit of hope back,
that we can start to do things, we can take action.
So seagrass ocean rescue is a collaboration between Swansea University, WWF, Project Seagrass,
and our funders Sky Ocean Rescue.
The aim of this project is to collect a million sea grass seeds,
and replant them in the biggest seagrass restoration project ever to happen in the UK.
A lot of our focus is on the land,
and people don't realise the role, the important role the ocean
can play in helping with the climate crisis.
We've lost 92% of seagrass across the
UK, and there has been a number of different factors which have caused that.
Some of these factors include pollution, boating
for example anchor damage, and so consequently
the seagrasses disappearing across the country.
We're finally here. We've collected a huge amount of seeds,
and we're planting them with an amazing bunch of volunteers.
We've been doing a lot of community engagement work around Dale,
and particularly the local community who live there.
So trying to work with the the passionate people of Dale
so that restoration can happen in harmony.
We took on a big ambition to collect a million seeds.
We've been out with volunteers where some of them are actually
snorkeling in the water picking the the seeds whilst
they're the floating on the surface, in about half a meter to a meter of water.
A lot of the seagrass in the UK is actually much deeper,
and the only way to access that that seagrass is to use scuba divers.
Over the last few months
we've had a huge team of people sort all that material
and start to put that into a place where we can begin to
separate the seeds, put those seeds into bags,
and begin to really prepare
for the planting of these seeds. We've been also doing a whole
series of other activities, one of those is to
undertake a baseline assessment of the biodiversity that
is present in Dale Bay, to look at all
the invertebrate beasties living in that habitat. We were going
into the the unknown, there's difficulties
along the way, it's been windy, we've had hail,
quite a lot of rain, but we've had an amazing resilient bunch of people
helping us. Over 2,000 people have taken part.
it's inspiring to see all those thousands of people part of our project.
The volunteers on this planting week have
just been amazing, they've been up at the crack of dawn with us, we've got
teams up on land that are a huge production line,
just adding little scoops of seeds
and sand into these small bags that we've had tons of volunteers prepping beforehand.
We've been into lots of different schools of all kinds of backgrounds.
Using primary school kids to fill 20,000 sandbags,
and the kids just go crazy
for the sand, filling them up.
And then they've been ferried down to the beach, where we've got a load of people doing
a good lot of heavy lifting, to carry it out to the boat.
From our staff at Swansea University, to members of WWF team coming down to help,
to students, to community members, all sorts of people coming to
join and contribute to this major first seagrass restoration project in the UK.
They walk away understanding that we need to restore our oceans.
And it sort of inspires hope that there are people who want to change the state of our UK Seas.
So our project has been a huge success,
but the missing component really has been the the fundamental support from government, with
actual fundamental change that recognises that our seas are in a terrible
state, and we're going to fight climate change if we're going to fight problems of food security.
Then we need to restore our oceans and that involves real government support.
We can all do something to help the ocean. We can reduce our use of plastics.
We can buy more sustainable seafoods.
As well as lobbying our local politicians
as well to push them to take action to protect and restore our seas.
We'll be back here over the next few years monitoring
the progress of our project. Putting near to a million seeds in Dale Bay is ultimately going to
result in a lot of seagrass.
If I came back here in a couple years,
and I went for a dive, and going along and I see this huge meadow,
that would be incredible!
That would be amazing, might be a few tears.