Scottish Seabird Centre

2024 was a successful and busy year for the Restoration Forth project. Hear from our Seagrass Officer, Eleri, about what she has been up to this year.

27 December 2024

If I could describe 2024 in three words, I would say: busy, fulfilling and muddy! My first year as a Seagrass Officer on the Restoration Forth project has been interesting and exciting. As 2024 comes to a close, I wanted to draw upon some of the moments that made my year memorable.

Following a busy winter overseeing the safe storage of our seagrass seeds, March quickly rolled around, and it was time to sow our precious seeds into the ground. Over four days of planting, 128 volunteers joined us to plant 125,000 seagrass seeds across three restoration sites. Despite challenging weather conditions and early starts, our committed volunteers kept a smile on their face and were grateful for a warm drink afterwards!

Volunteers plantng seagrass at Burntisland

In May, the project team were back out on the shores of Drum Sands to conduct seagrass transplant trials. Transplanting seagrass requires taking cores of existing seagrass and transporting them to the outside of the meadow. It is hard work but always funny to see your colleagues head to toe in mud! They appear to be doing well, as monitoring in September revealed expansion of up to 500% in some of the transplants.

A muddy team after transplanting seagrass

I was lucky enough to visit Orkney twice this year: for seagrass seed collection and the Orkney Science Festival. There is nothing quite like snorkeling in crystal clear waters over the vibrant seagrass meadows. During our community snorkels we spotted an amazing variety of different species such as eels, nudibranchs and pipefish; a constant reminder of the unique habitat forming capacity of seagrass and the life it can sustain. It was great to explore some of the other islands this year such as Hoy and Eday; Charlotte and I had a fabulous day at Eday primary school, delivering our Marine Superstars workshop and playing gannet games on the beautiful beach.

A nudibranch on a seagrass blade in Orkney

Autumn brought a series of community engagement events, with 195 volunteers helping us to monitor seagrass around the Forth and process seagrass material from Orkney, Burntisland and Inverness. Our continued collaboration with the Firth of Forth Lobster Hatchery streamlined the process this year, with most of the seeds dropping out of the shoots before they left the tanks. Lyle and I visited Wales in November to deliver the seagrass seeds for over-winter storage at Project Seagrass. The highlight of this trip was visiting the Project Seagrass nursery and seeing the amazing work of Emily and her team to grow seagrass in ponds before they are transplanted to the coast.

Seagrass growing in a pond at the Project Seagrass nursery

2024 has finished on a high, with a series of celebration events and targets reached. November marked the re-opening of the Discovery Experience at the Scottish Seabird Centre, complete with a shiny new seagrass meadow board featuring a specimen of Orcadian seagrass seeds and shoots. Restoration Forth celebrated the end of a 3-year funding cycle with an event at the Port of Leith Distillery, joined by partners and volunteers for an evening of sharing experiences and songs from the Newhaven Choir. It was great to come together with those involved with the project to celebrate successes of the past three years, including reaching the target of deploying 30,000 European flat oysters into the Firth of Forth.

Eleri, Emily and Jamie at the celebration event

I am excited to see what 2025 holds, with seagrass planting in March already on the horizon! If you wish to receive regular updates and be the first to hear of events, then please sign up to my mailing list here. Alternatively get in touch by emailing me at eleriw@seabird.org.

The Scottish Seabird Centre is a proud partner of this WWF-UK led project that brings together expertise from a range of partner organisations including Project Seagrass, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt University, the Marine Conservation Society, the Ecology Centre, Fife Coast and Countryside Trust, Edinburgh Shoreline and Heart of Newhaven Community.

This three year programme has been made possible by funding from Aviva, the ScottishPower Foundation, the Moondance Foundation, the estate of the late Ella MacGregor, and supported by the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund, through Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund (SMEEF) facilitated grants.