my name is Richard Lily and I'm a co-founder and director of the marineo project seagrass NGO being environmental NGO non-governmental organization my background is actually as a secondary school science teacher um so I trained as a a secondary school science teacher in Birmingham um and after teaching for a few years in in Well w just north of Birmingham I I went over to uh train to do a Dive Master to become a dive instructor um and that was over in Thailand uh and it was at that point really
I fell in love with the sea um and I was spending a lot of time taking people out scuba diving um but every day or every few weeks it constantly felt like we were seeing the destruction of the ocean and so I felt I needed to know more about this so I decided to enroll at University um and long story short I came back to the UK enrolled at swans University to study uh um aquatic ecology um um Masters and it was there that I really found seagrass and I guess the thing that struck me was I demograp
hically as a secondary school science teacher and particularly a biology teacher and then as a a diving instructor I'd never heard of this habitat you know so I'd heard about car ree I'd heard about mangroves um and as I started digging deeper into the lit around seagrasses I became apparent how important this habitat was and yet I couldn't square away in my head how I had not heard of this and you know speaking with other people they never never heard of seagrasses either and so the whole re ra
tionale I guess for setting up project seagrass as an NGO was to try and take some of that scientific content and communicate it to the public and really shine a light on this on this habitat um so yeah co-founded the the organization in 2013 so this is nearly 10 years ago now um and really as I continue to do my academic work um which was primarily linked to food security and Fisheries linked to seagrass Meadows um Wanted to continue to communicate the science around that so um I guess as my ac
ademic career progressed project Cass grew along aside that and then when I finished my PhD which was actually on the sustainable Supply Chain management of small scale capture Fisheries but linked to seagrass Meadows so essentially sustainability of Fisheries um and how seagrass Meadows um help the supply of seafood into that into those systems so yeah after actually three years ago now I went back into teaching um after my PhD and then as project seos continued to grow it just got to the stage
where we were becoming too big to do with something which was a passion project and so I left teaching um went with project SE full time and I've been doing it ever since I I guess it was that lack of lack of um recognition I guess as a habitat casses in the UK context anyway we're not part of the marine conservation conversation um the real impetus came from I guess from my colleagues who I co-founded project seagrass with one was one my professor at University um and another was a a friend fr
om the Dive Club and when we set up project seagrass we actually set it up out of my student flat in Swansea um and Richard unsworth who is is now my colleague he'd been previously working on the great bar Reef in Australia so' been working in the queens and government and at James Cook University over there with Leanne and so they'd move back from Australia I think this about 2010 and come into a situation where from Australia where St casses are monitored and mapped and there's you know ongoin
g Research into those systems into essentially a barel landscape in the UK and so for them they were really Keen to sort of raise the profile over here uh and know to really get them to put SE grasses on the map so that was the impetus to really yeah I guess raise the profile and then how that's been intertwined with with the research and the work is it's kind of evolved um one of the it's very difficult to care for a habitat to promote a habitat if no one knows about it so the first thing you r
eally need to do is say hey seagrass is a thing this is why they're important and scientists use the term ecosystem services but it's like what does nature give us and seagrasses give us a whole bunch of stuff which we don't take into consideration so things like like supporting our Fisheries um things like blue carbon they sequester enormous amounts of carbon so help to mitigate the effects of climate change and so really it was about celebrating these these habitats and and really actually goi
ng out and mapping them so I've just come down this last week from ory where we've got an ongoing mapping project so we're we're up there flying drones um ground truthing so in Water Swimming over seagrass Meadows um and confirming that what we're seeing from the sky is actually seagrass and then we're creating those habitat maps and we're sharing them with the nature agencies and we're sharing with them the local Council so that when they then want to make decisions they can make decisions base
d upon data and evidence so yeah I'd say that as the as the as the well it's been 10 years now as the 10 years have progressed the organizations changed but the the rationale has always been the same we we want to build a community around Cass and a recognition around the habitat and we also want to provide robust scientific research and and data so that people can make decisions and I think in 2019 there was a real emphasis on action we wanted to actually see if we could um really affect change
through through the work that we were doing and have our science inform positive action and so in 2019 we were part of a group that were delivered the first what we're going to call full scale or Meadow scale seagrass restoration project in the UK and that was in Dale and Pen Brookshire so it's two hectares of seagrass and then from that we've seen um just a proliferation of these ecosystem restoration projects um I think aided by the fact that it's the UN decade on ecosystem restoration so uh
huge huge impetus there but um yeah ultimately we're about saving the world Cass one of the challenges we have globally with grasses is they're not particularly well mapped um and that's something which as a global Community we're we're seeking to address um historically in the UK they haven't been particularly well mapped across the whole of the the the islands so um having a solid Baseline and understanding what we've lost is actually quite hard to do um there's a recent PhD which looked into
this and there's very good evidence that we've lost at least 44% of RC grasses but based upon the modeling it could be as much as 92 so sign significant loss of seagrass uh around the UK um some of that isri attributable to a a disease that came through in the 1930s and and uh wiped out a lot of seagrass but really a massive issue in the UK is water quality so anything that ends up in the rivers ends up in the Estes and ultimately that's where we find all of our seagrass Meadows and so we we kno
w that we've lost seagrass from a lot of the Estes around the UK and that's being linked to historically poor water quality The Optimist in in me now looks at the the opportunity to to let that recover you know we've seen we've got a restoration projects in the fth of fourth at the moment called restoration fourth and we know that historically the water quality in that history was frankly abysmal but over the last 203 years we've seen significant Improvement in that water quality and so now that
that pressure has been removed and the pressure that was threatening the SE grass to be there in the first place the seagrass isn't recovering naturally because there's not enough seed supply or propagules entering the system but if we can bring those seeds in then hopefully we can Kickstart that recovery process and then let nature take care of itself one thing to think about really is that sea grasses globally are come in all different shapes and sizes so we've got depending on which scientis
t you speak to let's say 72 different species now around the UK we've only got two of those species one's called uh dwarf grass which is very very small um and tends to be found quite high up on the seashore and you know if you're an orthologist and you're into bird life then uh speak species like Brent geese or widin um rely on this on their on their migrations and they consume a lot of seagrass um there also very good for St sediment stabilization so it being a plant and not an animal not not
an algae means that it's a actually the history of seagrass they evolved on land and returned to the Sea so they bring with them characteristics of marine of land plants and particularly angiosperms they have flowers they have seeds they have roots and that root system helps to to bind the sediment and to hold it in place so helps prevent Coastal erosion where we see seagrasses being lost we see increased erosion in those locations so you know for for particularly in in some Coastal communities
that is really quite an important feature of having those those intact Coastal systems Cass systems biodiversity benefits are huge you know we learn on we learn at 14 I think in school where if you have about food webs and food chains and the classic one would be you have some grass and you might have a rabbit that eats the grass and you might have some Fox that eats the rabbit um those same systems exist in the sea in fact we have sea grass we have rabbit fish um I don't we have sea foxes but w
e have you know predators that will will eat that and but you can see how having that primary producer at the bottom of the food chain really adds productivity to the coastal space um and again just having seagrass seagrasses occupy what would otherwise be Baron or flat sea floor you're creating really complex three-dimensional habitats that allow juvenile fish to live in and animals to forage um and so what we see is nearly a fifth of the world's largest Fisheries actually can trace their the o
rigin of those fish that are caught back to seagrass Meadows so hugely important for for Global Food security um n nutrient cycling so um when we overload our Coastal Waters a little bit with too many nutrients Su has helped to to um cycle those nutrients helped to reduce pathogens in the marine environment uh yeah but I guess one of the big ones which is um really drawn the attention of of uh well Humanity at the moment is ability to sequester carbon so this is to take carbon um out of the wate
r column and to bury in the sediment and that probably requires a little bit of explaining um when we think about carbon in terrestrial environments like trees a lot of the carbon that's getting sequestered or or stored is actually in the trunk itself or in the organic matter of the plant and that's wonderful and it's a very good store over short relatively short uh time periods 200 300 years but with seagrass ecosystems though because the sea the carbon is getting buried not in the the grass it
self but in the sediments Below in the root systems you're actually seeing carbon there which is buried from Millennia and so when we think about stabilizing the climate over Millennia now then that seagrass Meadows are a huge asset to have as a so as a call to action um if there's one thing that you could do to to um support I guess the the work that we're trying to do in saving the world sea grasses one is just talk about them you know one it's been very difficult to conserve a habitat or to d
rive passion into um seagrass ecosystems if no one's ever heard of them so we do a lot of work trying to just celebrate the seagrass ecosystems um through video through photography and and through ART and you know creative ways of of communicating SE grasses um uh so first is yeah just raising awareness the EOS system second is mapping so we've got a citizen science program called Cass spotter so it's an app you can load on a smartphone um and through that app you can if you come across Cass you
can take a photo of it and the GPS is uh in the photos these days so that gives us the point on their planet Earth where the seagrass was fil was um where the photo was taken or if you're a scuba diver or Surfer or snorkler you can retrospectively um you know from a GoPro or other camera you can load the the image into the system but what that gives us is the location data for seag grasses across across the globe and the exciting thing is now because the advanc is in Satellite technology we're
then able to pair that data with satellite data to start driving global maps of of seag grasses um and so I say they are the big two you know from a participatory perspective cp.org but number one is just just just be aware of them talk about them you know one day if we can get casses to be as famous as coral reefs then uh we probably won't have half the issues we've got now with management
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