Dr Richard Lilley has over a decade of experience of research into marine systems. He is passionate about education, particularly marine science communication and outdoor learning. His work focuses on the sustainable supply chain management of small-scale capture fisheries, particularly those linked to seagrass ecosystems.
Richard is particularly interested in the role of seagrass meadows in providing local food security and is currently working with an international team on a Seagrass Ecosystem Services Project across the Indo-Pacific Region with this focus (Thailand, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia and the Philippines). His work in the UK and Europe is primarily focussed on identifying seagrass ecosystem restoration opportunities and developing local capacity to support this.
Discover more:
www.projectseagrass.org
www.seagrassspotter.org
www.resow.uk
Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2023.
#seagrass #ecosystem #sustainability
My name is Richard Lilley and I’m a cofounder and director of the Marine ENGO Project Seagrass. ENGO being an environmental NGO’s, non-governmental organisation. My background is actually as a secondary school science teacher, so I trained as a secondary school science teacher in Birmingham and after teaching for a few years in Walsall,
Just north of Birmingham I went over to a train to do a dive master, to become a diving instructor. And that was over in Thailand. And it was at that point really I fell in love with the sea.
I was spending a lot of time taking people out scuba diving, but every day or every few weeks, it constantly felt like we were seeing the destruction of the ocean. And so I felt I needed to know more about this. So I decided to enrol at university and Long story
Short, I came back to the UK enrolled at Swansea University to study aquatic ecology masters, and it was there that I really found seagrass. And I guess the thing that struck me was, demographically as a secondary school science teacher and particularly a biology teacher,
And then as a diving instructor, I’d never heard of this habitat. So I’d heard about coral reefs, I’d heard about mangroves and as I started digging deeper into the literature around seagrasses, it became apparent how important this habitat was and
Yet I couldn’t square away in my head how I had not heard of this. And speaking with other people, they had never heard of seagrasses either. And so the whole rationale, I guess for setting up Project Seagrass as an NGO was to try and take some of that scientific
Content and communicate it to the public and really shine a light on this habit. So yes, cofounded the organisation in 2013, so this is nearly ten years ago now. And really as I continued to do my academic work, which was primarily linked to food security and
Fisheries linked to seagrass meadows I wanted to continue to communicate the science around that. So I guess as my academic career progressed, Project Seagrass grew alongside that. And then when I finished my PhD, which was actually on the sustainable supply chain management
Of small-scale capture fisheries but linked to seagrass meadows. So essentially sustainability of fisheries and how seagrass meadows help with the supply of seafood into those systems. After actually three years ago now, I went back into teaching, after my PhD,
And then as Project Seagrass continued to grow it just got to the stage where we were becoming too big to do something which was a passion project and so I left teaching, went with Project Seagrass full time and I’ve been doing ever since. I guess there was that lack of lack of
Recognition, I guess as a habitat, seagrasses in the UK context anyway, we’re not part of the marine conservation conversation. The real impetus came from, I guess, from my colleagues who I co-founded, Project Seagrass with. One was my professor at university and another was
A friend from the dive club and when we set up Project Seagrass, we actually set it up out of my student flat in Swansea and Richard Unsworth, who is now my colleague he’d been previously working on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. So he had been working with the Queensland government
And at James Cook University over there with Leanne, and so they’ve moved back from Australia, I think it was about 2010, and come into a situation where from Australia, where seagrasses are monitored and mapped and there’s ongoing research into those systems,
Into a essentially a barren landscape in the UK. And so for them, they were really keen to sort of raise the profile over here and to really get them to put seagrasses on the map. So that was the impetus to really I guess raise the profile. And then how that’s been intertwined
With the research and the work is it’s kind of evolved. One of the… it’s very difficult to care for a habitat or to promote a habitat if no one knows about it. So the first thing you really need
To do is say, “hey, seagrass is a thing. This is why they’re important” and scientists use the term ecosystem services but it’s like, what does nature give us? And seagrasses give us a whole bunch of stuff which we don’t take into consideration. So things like supporting our fisheries,
Things like blue carbon, it sequesters enormous amounts of carbon to helps to mitigate the effects of climate change. And so really it was about celebrating these habitats and really actually going out and mapping them. So I’ve just come down this last week from Orkney,
Where we’ve got an ongoing mapping project. So we’re up there flying drones, ground proofing, so in water, swimming over seagrass meadows and confirming what we’re seeing from the sky is actually seagrass. And we’re creating those habitat maps and we’re sharing them
With the nature agencies and we’re sharing with the local councils so that when they then want to make decisions, they can make decisions based upon data and evidence. So it’s been 10 years now ,as the 10 years have progressed, the organisation’s changed,
But the rationale has always been the same. We want to build a community around seagrass and a recognition around the habitat, and we also want to provide robust scientific research and data so that people can make decisions. And I think in 2019, there was a real
Emphasis on action. We wanted to actually see if we could really affect change through the work we were doing and have our science inform positive action. And so in 2019 we were part of a group that delivered the first what we’re going to call full scale or meadow scale seagrass
Restoration project in the UK and that was in Dale in Pembrokeshire. So it’s two hectares of seagrass and then from that we’ve seen just a proliferation of these ecosystem restoration projects. I think aided by the fact that it’s the UN decade on ecosystem restoration so huge, huge impetus there.
But yes, ultimately we’re about saving the world’s seagrass. One of the challenges we have globally with seagrasses is they’re not particularly well mapped, and that’s something which, as a global community we’re seeking to address. Historically in the UK they haven’t been particularly well mapped across the whole of the islands,
So having a solid baseline and understanding what we’ve lost is actually quite hard to do. There’s a recent PhD which looked into this and there’s very good evidence that we’ve lost at least 44% of our seagrasses but based upon the modelling, it could be as much as 92,
So significant loss of seagrass around the UK. Some of that is attributable to a disease that came through in the 1930s and wiped out a lot of seagrass. But really, a massive issue in the UK is water quality. So anything that ends up in the rivers,
Ends up in the estuaries and ultimately that’s where we find a lot of our seagrass meadows. And so we know that we’ve lost seagrass from a lot of the estuaries around the UK, and that’s been linked to historically poor water quality. The optimist in me now looks at the opportunity
To let that recover. You know, we’ve got our restoration projects in the Firth of the Forth at the moment called restoration Forth and we know that historically the water quality in that history was frankly abysmal. But over the last 20-30 years,
We’ve seen significant improvement in that water quality. And so now that that pressure has been removed and the pressure that was threatening the seagrass to be there in the first place, the sea grass isn’t recovering naturally because there’s not enough seed supply or propagules entering
The system but if we can bring those seeds in, then hopefully we can kick start that recovery process and then let nature take care of itself. One thing to think about really is that seagrasses globally come in all different shapes and sizes. So we’ve got,
Depending on which scientist you speak to, let’s say, 72 different species. Now around the UK, we’ve only got two of those species, one’s called dwarf field grass, which is very, very small and tends to be found quite high up on the seashore. And you know, if you’re an ornithologist and
You’re into your bird life, then species like Brent geese or wigeon rely on this on their migrations and they consume a lot of seagrass. This is also very good for sediment stabilisation,. So it being a plant, and not a not an algae, means that it’s… actually the history of
Seagrass they evolved on land and returned to the sea. So they bring with them characteristics of land plants and particularly angiosperms. So they have flowers, they have seeds, they have roots. And that root system helps to bind the sediment and to hold it in place, so helps prevent coastal
Erosion. Where we see seagrasses being lost, we see increased erosion in those locations. So particularly in some coastal communities that is really quite an important feature of having those intact coastal systems, seagrass systems. Biodiversity benefits are huge. You know,
We learn, we learn at 14 I think in school where if you have… about food webs and food chains and the classic one would be you have some grass and you have a rabbit that eats the grass and
You might have a fox that eats the rabbit. Those same systems exist in the sea. In fact we have seagrass, we have rabbit fish, we don’t have sea foxes, but we have predators that will eat that. But you can see how having that primary producer at the bottom of the food chain
Really adds productivity to the coastal space. And again, just having seagrasses occupy what would otherwise be barren or flat sea floor, you’re creating really complex three dimensional habitats that allow juvenile fish to live in and animals to forage. And so what we see is
Nearly 1/5 of the world’s largest fisheries actually can trace there the origin of those fish that are caught back to seagrass meadows, so hugely important for global food security. Nutrient cycling. So when we overload our coastal waters a little bit with too many nutrients,
Seagrasses help to cycle those nutrients, help to reduce pathogens in the marine environment. But I guess one of the big ones which has really drawn the attention of well humanity at the moment is their ability to sequester carbon. So this is to take carbon out of the
Water column and to bury it in the sediment. And that probably requires a little bit of explaining; when we think about carbon in terrestrial environments like trees, a lot of the carbon that’s getting sequestered or stored is actually in the trunk itself or in the
Organic matter of the plant and that’s wonderful. And it’s a very good store over a short, relatively short time periods, 200/300 years. With seagrass ecosystems though, because the carbon is getting buried not in the grass itself, but in the sediments below
In the roots systems you’re actually seeing carbon there, which is buried for millennia. And so when we think about stabilising the climate over millennia now, then seagrass meadows are a huge asset to have. As a call to action if there’s one thing that
You could do to support, I guess, the work we’re trying to do in saving the world seagrasses one is just talk about them. It’s been very difficult to conserve a habitat or to drive passion into
Seagrass ecosystems if no one’s ever heard of them. So we do a lot of work trying to just celebrate the seagrass ecosystems through video, through photography and through art, and creative ways of communicating seagrasses. So first is yes, just raising awareness of the
Ecosystem. Second is mapping. So we’ve got a system science programme called Seagrass Spotter. So it’s an app you can download on a smartphone and through that app you can, if you come across seagrass, you can take a photo of it and the GPS is in the photos
These days so that gives us the point on the planet Earth where the seagrass photo was taken. Or if you’re a scuba diver or surfer or snorkeler, you can retrospectively you know from a GoPro or other camera you can load the image into the system, but what that gives
Us is the location data for seagrasses across the globe. And the exciting thing is now because the advances in satellite technology, we’re then able to compare that data with satellite data to start driving global maps of seagrasses. And so I say they are the big two.
From a participatory perspective seagrassspotter.org but number one is to be just aware of them and talk about them. You know, one day, if we can get seagrass to be as famous as coral reefs, then we probably won’t have half the issues we’ve got now with management.