To help meet the needs of the growing seagrass restoration community in Scotland, the WWF Restoration Forth team have been working with the North Berwick Lobster Hatchery staff to create a seagrass facility which makes use of existing resources, saving both money and time and enabling the project to harvest and process more seeds for restoration.
Until this project, over the winter, the hatchery usually shut down due to the natural cycle of lobsters. Now they will be able to stay open and process seagrass seeds for WWF Restoration Forth during these months. This will double the project capacity to process seagrass seeds. The education, citizen science and research equipment purchased has seen the team booking in groups for education and engagement events to utilise the new kit.
In 2022 SMEEF was able to provide a grant of £48,831 to support this work using resources from the Nature Restoration Fund.