Tag: community conservation

Dale Bay on a summer’s day bustles with a community in motion. Yachts bob on their moorings, a group explores rockpool life on the shore, holiday makers catch crabs from the pontoon and a local fishing boat putters out to check on shellfish pots. Setting off from the slip way,  a group of paddleboarders cruises across the bay and stops. Their leader is pointing to a dark patch beneath them, “It’s here, see?“  Just beneath the surface lies a hidden sweep of Welsh natural heritage, a vibrant carpet of seagrass. Not a seaweed, but a plant rooted in the sediment with leaves and flowers and seeds, growing beneath the waves. For decades, these underwater meadows were in decline, slipping away shoot by shoot.  Today scientists, volunteers and the local community have united to turn things around. Through an approach known as co-production, the restoration plan for Dale Bay’s seagrass was developed collectively through a series of public meetings and discussions with local stakeholders. Together with scientists, the restoration of Dale Bay’s seagrass is being championed by the people who live, work, and play on these waters. By working together the community is helping to bring Dale’s seagrass meadow back to life. Dale Bay in Pembrokeshire was the location of the UK’s first major seagrass restoration project. Paddleboarders explore seagrass in Dale Bay as part of a seagrass celebration event. The hidden heritage of Dale bay Seagrass meadows once carpeted thousands of hectares of the UK’s shallow coastal waters. Over the last century, an estimated 92% of that habitat has been lost to declining water quality, coastal development, and disease. Welsh seagrass has shown a similar decline, and the meadow off the shores of Dale Bay has thinned to a fraction of its historic extent. But the bay sits within the Pembrokeshire Marine Special Area of Conservation and it was here that Project Seagrass chose to test whether the loss could be reversed. The restoration area is roughly the size of three rugby pitches. Originally a 2-hectare planted area, it was extended towards the foreshore last year with the community’s approval and now covers 3 hectares. A tiny fragment of the thousands of hectares lost nationally. But the point was never the size of the patch. It was whether the model for restoration could work. Finding common ground: co-production in action Restoring ecosystems and habitat works best when the people who live and work in them are leading the charge. Co-producing a project with communities and stakeholders, though complex, can lead to long-term support for the project and huge ecological wins. Dale was a landmark case, the first of its kind in UK seagrass restoration, and one of the few marine restoration projects where the co-production process itself has been formally studied. It was a huge source of learning and scientists reported that for marine restoration to truly be successful, projects need to work with local people from the outset, particularly those likely to be impacted. The seagrass meadows in Dale are now thriving, through the work of Project Seagrass, Swansea University and the local community, and with funding from WWF and Sky Ocean Rescue, and supported by the Pembrokeshire Marine SAC and Pembrokeshire Coastal Forum laying the foundations. This was followed by many years of additional work and support from partners, alongside the dedication of local volunteers. The resulting numbers for Dale reflect the success. In one year (2019-2020) 2,107 volunteers, from 44 separate organisations planted 800,000 seagrass seeds over 4,170 person-hours. At just one event in March 2026, 50 volunteers gathered to help Project Seagrass with their latest round of planting. Participants included local residents, enthusiasts from across the UK, and students from Swansea University. Using modified caulking guns developed by The Fieldwork Company in the Netherlands, the team injected 40,000 seeds into the sediment in  coordinated quadrats, with a further 180 nursery-grown plants set by hand. Local volunteers support seagrass planting efforts in Dale Bay, spring 2026. Volunteers have been central to seagrass planting efforts in Dale Bay. But beyond the numbers, the impact of co-production is reflected in the community changes: the formation of the Dale Seagrass Stakeholder Group, local freediving groups assisting with planting, moorings installed for visiting sailors, local skippers supporting annual dive monitoring, and Windswept Watersports running educational sessions about the seagrass for community groups and the general public. Local pot fisher Mark, of Lilly May Fishing, worked with Project Seagrass from the outset, helping to identify the best site for restoration and deploy monitoring equipment. Concerned that lifting his gear was tearing up the meadow, he designed a modified shellfish pot that reduces entanglement without affecting the catch. This is a genuine example of local knowledge feeding back into restoration practice. The Pembrokeshire Coastal Forum facilitated the development of the Dale Seagrass Stakeholder Group which now meets twice yearly. This group brings together community representatives from Dale Yacht Club, mooring holders, local fishers, business owners, Dale Fort Field Centre and the Community Council, alongside statutory bodies including the Pembrokeshire Marine SAC, and the Project Seagrass staff. It is chaired not by Project Seagrass, but by community member Fil Marshall. This means the community sits at the heart of the project’s operation, with the stakeholder group co-managing the site and the visitor moorings. Its founding Terms of Reference anticipate that it will eventually become a self-sustaining local management body involving a slow transfer of governance from project to place. So what is it that makes the co-production model in Dale Bay so crucial for long-term marine protection? Pembrokeshire SAC Officer, Sue Burton puts it this way, “Quite simply, marine protection needs massive collective action to start making any meaningful differences across the globe, but this starts with small-scale local action. Local management and protection needs involvement and support from local people in order to be successful. Involving local people builds a sense of ownership and that is what we need for long-term management.” Burton describes an example where she was getting frequent calls from