Replanting landscapes as a restoration effort can pose a bevy of challenges.
How to get the seeds planted in such large quantities? How to ensure that the soils are conducive for growth and that conditions (water, sunlight, etc.) are best for the seeds to germinate? How to keep animals from eating the young plants as they develop?
Now imagine considering all these concerns for plants in an underwater marine environment?
Eelgrass populations have declined in water bodies around the world due to extreme storms, warming oceans, disease, and most importantly, nutrient pollution. Here in Buzzards Bay, we have lost 75 percent of the Bay’s historic eelgrass coverage, although there are positive signs of recovery as nitrogen pollution levels have dropped in recent years.
Some eelgrass has returned on its own in response to water quality improvements. Others have had to be replanted. More than two decades ago, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science had invented a new approach for harvesting and distributing seeds. Since 2000, more than 71 million seeds have been distributed on more than 500 acres offshore there. Those seeds have grown into plants that have spread to cover more than 10,000 acres.
But such efforts were based on scattering seeds in vast quantities, and scientists didn’t capture the data to see exactly where and how the plants thrive. In West Falmouth Harbor, Melanie Hayn, the Buzzards Bay Coalition’s Brenninkmeyer Post Doctoral Fellow, has just completed a first-of-its kind planting test in any of Falmouth’s long-impaired but slowly improving embayments.
As a Coalition Brenninkmeyer Fellow, Hayn is given a two-year fully funded opportunity to study a question of importance to Buzzards Bay while drawing on other resources to bring the best science to bear. Hayn is working with colleagues and testing equipment from the Marine Biological Laboratory on this planting experiment. This collaboration bolsters the science and allows the Coalition to efficiently address and answer critical scientific questions for Buzzards Bay.
So, on a mild sunny day in late October, Hayn and two colleagues from the Marine Biological Laboratory—post-doc Miranda Roethler and technician Sarah Merolla —meet at the West Falmouth Landing to load a small motorboat with stakes, PVC piping, buoys, and all sizes of rope and zip ties. Hayn and Roethler have brought scuba gear, and a wet suit and dry suit, respectively. Merolla will stay dry on the boat today, but has layered up in the 50-degree air. The trio of scientists head out to the area they call the South Basin. They anchor and Hayn hops overboard into the eight- or ten-foot-depths (she doesn’t want to touch the surface of the muck on the bottom as it will be stirred up by her footsteps).
