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