School of Sustainability

Three years of surveys, then the first eelgrass goes in

The seagrass that matters most to the Rewilding Oder Delta team this summer is not growing anywhere. It is lying on the beach at Lubmin, cast up by storms, where volunteers gather it before it rots. Material recovered like this is one of the sources the team is exploring for planting stock, so that nothing needs to be cut from the surviving wild beds. There are too few of those left to borrow from.

The remaining beds sit in fragments around the island of Ruden, on Germany's Baltic coast, first mapped by underwater surveys in 2023. Since then the team has built partnerships with scientists and restoration specialists across the region. This summer, through the Blue Stepping Stones initiative, funded by the German Federal Environmental Foundation, the first pilot plots went into the water. The plots are deliberately small. They exist to answer whether common eelgrass will take hold under local conditions, and whether the method copes with wave exposure and shifting sediment.

The method is the clever part. Rather than divers pushing single shoots into the sediment one by one, young plants are established first on ropes woven from old seagrass, then rolled out across the seabed like turf. The technique, developed by German company ZosteraTec, has shown promise in more sheltered Baltic waters. Ruden is not sheltered; stronger waves and moving sediment are what the pilot tests. Ringo Behn, the team's coastal ecosystems coordinator, calls the plots an experiment, not a result.

What is at stake is considerable. Eelgrass meadows nurse Atlantic herring, hold the seabed together, clean the water, soften erosion and store carbon - and nutrient pollution, fishing damage and warming have stripped much of them from the Baltic over recent decades. The team will watch these first plots through the coming months, and let what survives decide where the next ones go.

Rewilding Europe · Read the source

A hutting group starts again on former forestry ground in Galloway

At a confluence of rivers in Galloway, on land the group describes simply as ex-forestry, a small band is trying to bring back the Scottish hut. The Friends of the Hutters are at the very beginning - the project listing dates itself to 2026 - and what exists so far is a site inside the Galloway Dark Skies park, an off-grid arrangement, compost toilets, and the start of a forest garden.

The compost toilets matter because they are real. So is the forest garden, and the off-grid setup that means the site runs without mains anything. These are the first, unglamorous things a piece of rough ground needs before anyone can stay on it, and they are in. Beyond that, the listing offers volunteering, courses and woodland management work, with visits by arrangement through the group's Facebook page - which suggests the site is meant to be made by many hands rather than bought finished.

The group calls itself a revival of Scottish hutting, and for its statement of intent it borrows a Wendell Berry poem about a ruined place slowly renewed by people who stay, ending on the line that its hardship is its possibility. The poem is the most finished thing they have published. The practical record is thin - no hut count, no acreage - because there is not much yet to report. The honest state of it is: a piece of land, a working toilet, a young forest garden, and a poem.

Permaculture Association · Read the source