The project builds upon the unique expertise and lessons learned in our previous successful seagrass restoration (LIFE-BIOMARES project), that we follow for over a decade. This demonstrated the methodological approaches required for success, and the importance of using large spatial and temporal scales (therefore a 7 years project) to ensure stability in open coast seagrass restoration and long-term seagrass habitat conservation and restoration in salt pans. This project will be pioneer in demonstrating a solution to obtain biomass of critically rare marine plant species for restoration by integration in sustainable mutually beneficial multitrophic aquaculture. This innovation will be applied here to upscale and demonstrate the capacity, potential and benefits of sublittoral Atlantic seagrass restoration at large scale. This project will also pioneer demonstration as a first case in Europe, of an official accreditation in the global carbon market of the carbon stocks that are retained and sequestered by conservation and restoration of seagrass habitat for carbon footprint compensation. This translation of the conservation actions into value in the global carbon market is expected to trigger a wave of other projects claiming similar creditation thereby motivating private funding to invest in marine vegetation as compensation of carbon footprints. The project innovations include this and several other sustainable solutions that will persist in the long-term and will be exploited and expanded globally to similar conservation and restoration initiatives worldwide.
LIFE-RESTORESEAGRASS is composed of five work packages (WP). Of these, WP2 and WP3 involve a large number of specific practical field and laboratory work tasks, whereas the other 3 are transversal across the whole project.
WP1 - Management and Reporting
WP2 - Conservation and restoration of infralittoral seagrasses
WP3 - Monitoring and Evaluation
WP4 - Dissemination, Communication
WP5 - Sustainability, Replication and Exploitation of project results
