Automated Seagrass Planter aims to restore and preserve vital coastal ecosystems

Earth Change, a division of the Land & Water group, an environmental engineering company, has collaborated with marine conservation organisation Project Seagrass, to develop and test an Automated Seagrass Planter (ASP). 

The patent pending ASP aims to revolutionise the large-scale planting of seagrass to rejuvenate degraded habitats, enhance coastal resilience, and promote marine biodiversity. A trial was conducted in Dale Bay, Pembrokeshire, during June 2023, to test the scalable prototype. The project aims to restore and conserve the UK’s seagrass ecosystems, as well as to raise awareness of its importance and work towards its future protection as it mitigates climate change by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

In Britain, most of the planting of seagrass is done by hand at low tide, or by divers at a high cost and low output. The ASP aims to reduce the time and effort needed for manual planting, as well as to minimise the environmental impact and invasiveness of divers standing on the seabed and creating holes by hand.