When Karen McGlathery used to swim in the coastal bays off Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the water would quickly turn cloudy and brown as sediment swirled around her.
Now, 25 years later, for as far as she can swim the water remains clear. The sediment is anchored in place by lush green seagrass meadows, teeming with fish, scallops and crustaceans.
McGlathery, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, is part of a team running the largest seagrass restoration project in the world in these coastal bays — and one of the most successful.
The two-decade-long project could be proof that marine habitats can be brought back to life in a way that is self-sustaining.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
In the 1930s, a wasting disease swept along the U.S. east coast, wiping out huge swaths of eelgrass.
Despite covering less than 0.2 percent of the ocean, seagrass provides a vital habitat for marine life, boosts commercial fishing, helps purify water, protects coastlines and even traps and stores microplastics.
Where Virginia’s coastal bays used to be carpeted in this species of seagrass, suddenly they were barren.
That changed in the late 1990s with the discovery of some small patches of seagrass in the bay, the existence of which proved that conditions could once again support the plants.
So, Robert Orth, who was a marine biologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS) until his retirement this year, started with small-scale experiments, digging up adult seagrass from other areas and transplanting it into the bay.
While the seagrass survived, the process wasn’t scalable. After all, restoring thousands of acres through transplanting would have been a huge logistical challenge.
But Orth had an idea.
“We said, well, why not try to launch a restoration program using seeds?”
In 2001, he started an effort to physically rebuild the ocean ecosystem, seed by seed. From a moving boat, he and his team scattered seeds across four bays: South, Cobb, Spider Crab and Hog Island. The seeds survived, growing into plants which, in turn, produced their own seeds. From there, Orth said, “Nature kind of took over.”
Over the last 20 years, supported by an army of volunteers, the project team has sown nearly 75 million seeds.
Around 9,000 acres of coastal bays are now blanketed with eelgrass, which has improved water quality, increased marine biodiversity and helped mitigate climate change by capturing and storing carbon.
The project, said Carlos Duarte, a seagrass expert and marine science professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, is “game changing.”
And today, restoration projects around the world are looking to Virginia for lessons.
Laura Paddison writes for Reasons to Be Cheerful, a nonprofit editorial project that strives to be serve as a tonic for these tumultuous times. This story is part of the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous reporting about responses to social problems. It originally appeared here.
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