Bringing back the Lost Kelp Forests of Europe - Project Vlog

if you are a musty earth member you know we've done a lot of reforestation on land but last year we started wondering what we could do with the ocean floor you see restoring kelp or seaweed forests gives us an opportunity to not only capture carbon in a different way but also to spread our impact to marine ecosystems and positively affect biodiversity in those areas these often forgotten sub-aquatic forests are the cradle of the ocean but have disappeared from the coast of many european countries if we are serious about fighting climate change and stopping the loss of biodiversity then this is a great opportunity to jump into action hi everyone welcome back to mossy earth today we are here in portugal to kick off our kelp restoration trial last year around the start of the pandemic thiago one of our biologists reached out to jan a marine biologist from sea forester together they hatched a plan for a trial to test a cow propagation method using the spore bag technique the species we will be focusing on is golden kelp its range extends from morocco to the uk and as such can be used in multiple projects along the european coastline and given its range extends to warmer waters it may be more resilient to climate change to get things started jan and inish from sea forester headed to the north of portugal to collect the reproductive structures of the kelp this here is the source and inside are billions of spores basically out of which can grown your kelps now we cut it above the meristem which is now down here underwater but if we cut it above as i said the plant can continue to grow and we didn't kill it then we have our material the kelp was then dried and kept cool overnight so that it will start releasing the spores once it comes in touch with water the goal will be to dive at the three sites that have been prepared by jan and their team and to put the reproductive kelp structure that was harvested from the north of portugal inside the mesh bags so that the spores can come out and it can start reproducing to ensure the spores are released on the seafloor we are bringing the kelp down to each dive site in a ziploc bag this way we only open them down there and we will lose less spores in the process to help us in this project we are also partnering with jose from club navalcache who provides the diving gear the boat and the local dive site expertise jose was the first one to go in to find the dive set as this area has very low visibility and we need to conserve air for the task ahead okay looks like we're doing a truck here yeah plan of action is what we all go down together all four so that we have one one dive per side on the three sides we have today uh first um jose and i will check if all the the bolts the screws are still attached properly that we deployed the other day as we had to use glue i'm not so sure so i'm taking some line down also uh if we lost some of the screws we're just going to tie the mesh packs onto the rocker then once they all secured the the seaweed master has all the material so we're just gonna insert them into the mesh box take the the plastic back out tie them up and then basically move away because they might actually release their spores quite quickly jose sent his smb to the surface let us know he found the first sight by this point it had been more than two years since my last dive in the pre-pandemic world so i was really excited to get it underwater again as you can see the visibility isn't great down there but there are a few fish and some beautiful sponges but it really looks like it could use a pretty kelp forest right on these rocks after the mesh bags were securely attached to the boats it was time to put the first kelp in as you can see we really try to keep the bag closed and only open it right when we are pushing the kelp in the mesh bag so that any spores that get released fall on the rock and on the mesh bag instead of being scattered in total we got six scout bags done at this site which will be sufficient to test this method here very good the attachment points i wasn't so sure if they were fitting well but super good for the second sight we had a bit more trouble finding it because the visibility was lower and the gps marker is not as accurate i i can't tell from this it's either here or there somewhere in this area so it seems like uh we have a victory because i found the the second side we were getting a bit worried there that we might not find it so we're gonna go quick now to put some of that kelp put the bags down put the kelp in there and then so move to the third side before these ones get too hot after the trouble finding the site we also had to contend with a bit more surge caused by the waves but the work itself went like clockwork and we got another six scout bags done at this site okay we're now on our third site we hit it straight on so this time we don't have to go looking for it everything looks really quiet looks like a but apparently there's quite a bit of current down there so yeah hoping to get the third site done and that'll be it for for the day for our third and final site we hit the spot right away which was lucky because the current increased significantly so we had to drop right on top of the anchor and it was indeed less than a meter away from the first bolts we added another six kelp bags to this site for a total of 18 bags for our trial while this might seem like a low number please remember this is first and foremost an experiment to understand how well this technique works while we will use other more scalable methods such as green gravel for other sites this sporeback technique is ideal for areas where there are deep holes in the rock and also where there are scattered rocks and a sandy bottom as is the case here together with seaforster we will be exploring new methods for kelp propagation and then scaling them up to start making a serious impact on the coastline all of this was funded by our amazing mossy earth members who have a monthly subscription with us to fund these projects if you would like to support projects that fight climate change and stop the loss of biodiversity then please check out mossy.earth and consider becoming a member also if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing to the channel and leaving the video a like until next time cheers

Channel: Mossy Earth

Views: 22,566

Keywords: kelp forest, kelp restoration, kelp forest diving, kelp restoration project, kelp forests facts, kelp forests climate change, kelp forests disappearing, kelp forests fish, kelp forests around the world, kelp forests and coral reefs, kelp forests dying, kelp forests ecosystem, kelp forests and carbon sequestration, kelp forests are common all over the world, rewilding, marine rewilding, life at sea, life in the ocean

Id: qMEwTngMCTI

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021