Wilder Firths

There is an array of abiotic factors (non-living variables that influence where organisms can live) that you can measure when gathering data on the suitability of a site to support a species. In the marine environment this consists of factors like dissolved oxygen concentration, light availability and turbidity.

Whilst in an ideal world you would test as many abiotic factors as you can as frequently as possible, in reality that isn’t always feasible as costs quickly add up. In an effort to find the best compromise, we’ve opted to use a datalogger to continuously measure temperature and salinity at a location where one of our native oyster (Ostrea edulis) survivability trials is planned in the Cromarty Firth.

Why temperature and salinity? These are the two universal environmental metrics identified by the European Native Oyster Habitat Restoration Monitoring Handbook (2021) to facilitate comparison across native oyster restoration projects. These variables have been shown to impact the ecology of native oysters. In spring they begin to filter feed and grow at temperatures >7°C, and have been shown to have greater survival rates in marine areas with higher salinity (>30psu) as a result of relationships between salinity and things like stress.

The datalogger is currently in a phase of testing, during which we will assess whether it is the best equipment for us to use. It is programmed to record temperature and salinity once an hour, but we will adjust this as necessary.

All going well, our plan is to continuously measure temperature and salinity using the logger, and use smaller, cheaper handheld instruments to take on-the-spot measurements of things like turbidity once we have a survivability trial up and running.

More for you on this project soon, wish us luck!

Further reading: zu Ermgassen, P.S.E., Bos, O., Debney, A., Gamble, C., Glover, A., Pogoda, B., Pouvreau, S., Sanderson, W., Smyth, D. and Preston, J. (eds) (2021). European Native Oyster Habitat Restoration Monitoring Handbook. The Zoological Society of London, UK., London, UK.

TLDR: We are preparing for a busy spring/summer season, and our datalogger recording salinity and temperature at the blue mussel farm is functioning well.

The winter period has been a time of of talking to governing bodies, landowners and the local council about things like access, planning requirements and leasing of the sea bed for our native oyster nursery. We’ve also been connecting with a hatchery on the west coast (which is just shy of a two-hour drive from our proposed nursery site) that would like to donate young native oysters for us to cultivate for restoration.

If the required permissions are in place and the nursery can be installed prior to our oysters arriving late spring/early summer, they will be cultivated there. If we experience delays, local blue mussel farmer Andrew will allow us to house them on line 1 of his farm between their arrival and our own nursery being up and running.

In readiness for the potential outcome that our oysters will call the blue mussel farm home for a wee while, we have been gathering data on the environmental characteristics of the water at line 1 of the farm since late September last year. Monitoring both salinity and temperature, our AquameasureSAL is providing us with some valuable insight as to the variation of these two metrics over time, allowing us to assess the baseline conditions of the site.

Once the oysters are in baskets and suspended from the farm, we will also be able to compare this data with things like growth rate and mortality to see whether there could be any relationships and use this information to inform restoration. Salinity and temperature are the two universal environmental monitoring metrics outlined in the European Native Oyster Habitat Restoration Monitoring Handbook (2021).

Fingers crossed that the planning process runs as smoothly as possible and we’re able to get our native oyster nursery up and running! As always, you’ll be the first to know.

Check out this vlog if you'd like to hear more about on this topic from the boat and my desk!

Today’s update comes from the chilly waters of Scotland, where we’re helping to raise the profile of seagrasses in the community and improve our understanding of seagrass propagation.

In this vlog, project biologist Francis and volunteers from Moray Ocean Community suit up and swim down to the seabed to collect seagrass rhizomes.

The plants they gathered will be grown and displayed in an exhibit at a local aquarium to show the public more about this important habitat-forming species. We’re also hoping to gain insights that will aid potential seagrass translocations and growing seagrasses ourselves.

As the days become longer and the weather (slightly) warmer, last Saturday Francis and I finally had the chance to venture back out into the ‘field’, or in our case, firth. This time we were trying out something new to us: eDNA sampling with a Van Veen grab.

With glassy water the conditions were perfect, making our first test of the equipment slightly less daunting. So, why exactly were we collecting eDNA (Environmental DNA)?

We were collecting eDNA from the location of our proposed native oyster (Ostrea edulis) nursery (diagram below), which we will hopefully receive planning permission for in the coming weeks. For now, we have opted to collect eDNA from the sediment rather than the water. This is for a few reasons, but the main one is that in an area of high flow (as is the case for our proposed nursery site in the Cromarty Firth) the data we gather from the sediment is likely to be less influenced by tidal conditions. We hope that this could be a good way to monitor biodiversity over time.

Our mission on Saturday was to take five samples in total along a transect of 100m (roughly the length our nursery will be), so that’s one sample every 20m. The reality was that even with the flat, calm conditions and the fact that we were anchored, our small boat was being dragged along slightly by the falling tide. This meant our samples were roughly 150m off target. For the purposes of this initial test of the method, we are not too concerned about this, as we still successfully gathered samples to test how effectively we can extract eDNA from them before our native oyster nursery is installed.

Once the nursery is installed, we will be able to tie our boat onto it and have full confidence that we are taking samples from where we need. On another positive note, the grab worked very well! There is a mechanical latch that you secure before dropping it into the water that releases once it hits the sea floor, making the jaws close and allowing material to be brought securely back up to the surface.

We took the camera out on the boat to show you the process, check out the vlog on our Field Notes channel below if you want to see more!

The Van Veen grab was kindly loaned to us by the laboratory team at the University of the Highlands and Islands Inverness Campus. We booked in slightly late and they are very busy at the moment, but their team will look for benthic fauna within the sediment samples and get our results back to us this summer.

We have some exciting news! Mossy Earth has been awarded £79,964 of funding by the Nature Restoration Fund (NRF) to support our work with seagrasses as part of our Cromarty Seascape project in 2024 and 2025.

This presents a chance for us to amplify our restoration efforts in an area with great potential. The funding will cover activities including mapping the extent of seagrass meadows within approximately 1100ha of suitable intertidal seagrass habitat on foot and using drones, water quality monitoring, sampling for contaminants and two small trial translocation plots. This work will help inform future seagrass restoration efforts in the project area.

In recent weeks we’ve been busily laying the groundwork for the main suite of survey work to take place, and we’re very excited to take you on this journey with us.

This project is supported by the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund, managed by NatureScot.

We’ve gotten a lot done this month at our Cromarty seascape project both on the oyster and the seagrass front so I hope you enjoy this update! If you have any questions please let me know in the comments below.

Dive in to our latest vlog where I introduce you to our new team member, Josie, and update you on how our seagrass fieldwork this year is progressing!

We've been collecting more baseline data and teaming up with SPUN (the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) to see whether fungal symbionts could be present within the seagrass meadows in the project area. We’ve also been working with a drone operator to assess the extent of seagrass meadows and how we can use machine learning in this process. This is all really exciting work as it will importantly inform restoration efforts going forward!

Unfortunately, things aren't progressing as smoothly when it comes to our native oyster nursery due to things outside of our control. Fingers crossed the tide changes on this soon.

If you have any questions for us, please go ahead and pop them in the comments below!

Take a look at our latest vlog update from our native oyster and seagrass project in Scotland! The project area has some new and unwelcome residents that the community are teaming up to address…

We also have updates hot off the press for you on our seagrass and native oyster nurseries, as well as the results from the research undertaken by a Masters student that we supported early this summer.

Until next time!

We thought our seagrass fieldwork was over for 2024, but after an exciting visit down to a similar project in Edinburgh - Restoration Forth - we found out about the successes of their restoration trials and were inspired to try these out in our own project area.

In this vlog, we cover our trip down to Edinburgh where we meet several members of the Restoration Forth team and the areas where they work. Francis and I then head out in our project area to trial transplanting seagrass using a coring method. Myself and Isla also visited the local high school to share our work with some of the students. PLUS a little insider info on a new and exciting partnership which we will be announcing very soon!

We have some very exciting news to share… we have been awarded £544,558.76 of funding to plant 4.2 hectares of seagrass meadow in the Scottish Highlands!

Following extensive baseline and investigative surveys, as well as small seagrass translocation trials undertaken in 2024 supported by the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund (NRF), managed by NatureScot, the delivery of planting 4.2 hectares of intertidal seagrass meadow over three years will be supported by the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund (SMEEF), an initiative supported by the Scottish Government’s Marine Scotland Directorate, NatureScot and Crown Estate Scotland.

Our Vision

The vision of Wilder Firths (Linneachan nas Fhiadhaiche), formerly known as Cromarty Seascape, is for the firths surrounding the Black Isle to be home to a resilient mosaic of biogenic habitats that support diverse and thriving ecosystems. Central to achieving and sustaining this vision are local communities that are connected to and invested in their coastal environment.

The Species

Historically overlooked in the area, seagrass meadows are one of the focus habitats of Wilder Firths alongside native oyster (Ostrea edulis) reefs. Seagrass species in the area are dwarf eelgrass (Nanozostera noltei), common eelgrass (Zostera marina) and beaked tasselweed (Ruppia maritima). Common eelgrass encompasses variants that are found either intertidally or subtidally, whereas dwarf eelgrass and beaked tasselweed are only found in the intertidal zone.

Restoration Methods

As well as collecting and planting seed with other members of the local community, our team will trial more experimental approaches such as transplanting seagrass with sediment (coring) and mechanised seed collection and planting. Small scale trials of intertidal seagrass coring, a method previously used by Restoration Forth, indicate that the method could be an effective way to restore seagrass meadows when compared with other methods such as seeding or transplanting bare root seagrass plants.

New Hires

Want to be part of the team delivering this project? There is still time to apply for our new positions: Seagrass Officer and Community & Funding Officer! Applications close midnight on the 7th of March. See our Jobs page for more details.

After a relatively quiet winter it is heating up again for us on the Wilder Firths (formerly Cromarty Seascape) team in sunny Scotland! ☀️

We managed to get out to undertake some more trial seagrass coring in the Beauly Firth in amongst necessary, but admittedly less enjoyable (don’t tell anyone we said that), office work. Josie made very good use of our new mallet to install wooden stakes to make our coring site easy to relocate!

This approach to seagrass planting is currently limited to the winter months to reduce the risk of spreading a marine invasive non-native species called the American slipper limpet (Crepidula fornicata) which is a marine snail. The larvae of this species are inactive during the winter months, so at this time the risk of us unintentionally transporting individuals not visible to the naked eye within sediment is reduced.

Our main focus has been wrapping up the final report for the baseline seagrass surveys last year supported by the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund, managed by NatureScot, and getting everything in place to begin our seagrass planting project supported by the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement fund.

In other exciting news, we have been building capacity in a number of ways to gear up for the coming years, including acquiring a means of transport for the team as well as our equipment and a headquarters so that we have a local base for operations as we enter this busy period.

Once again it has been a busy time for the Wilder Firths team here in sunny Scotland! ☀️

This period kicked off with the welcome event for our Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement (SMEEF) funded project that will focus on the planting of 4.2 hectares of intertidal seagrass meadow over the next three years.

Next, we headed to Cromarty with Moray Ocean Community volunteers to search for the invasive non-native American slipper limpet — a species that hadn’t been surveyed before in the stretch of coastline we focused on.

Unfortunately, we discovered that it has spread as far west in the Cromarty Firth as our proposed native oyster nursery site. Still, the gloomy day was brightened a bit by a visit from one of our local raptor species.

We've welcomed four new team members and they've hit the ground running developing ways to collect seagrass health data out in the field using tablets, continued mapping overlooked meadows in the area and started looking at potential restoration sites as part of a seagrass planting project supported by the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund (SMEEF).

Isla also had a catch up with Bethan from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks about the exploratory work we collaborated on last year to search for seagrass fungal symbionts. This was part of a project supported by the Scottish Government's Nature Restoration Fund, managed by NatureScot. Want to have a look at the report rather than watch the video? Check it out here.