June 16, 2025
Blog post by Anushka Rajagopalan
I attended the Zoological Society of London’s second Seascape Symposium: Reconnecting the Seascape (in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and University of Edinburgh, co-organised by our fellow Dr Philine Zu Ermgassen) in June 2025 in London, UK. This was an exciting opportunity to learn advancing science, policies, and practices that aim to reconnect coastal habitats and global nature restoration targets. The UK Challenger Society for Marine Science greatly helped in providing funding for me to attend this experience.
In 2022, ZSL held the first seascape symposium, aiming to exchange knowledge among scientists, regulators, policy makers, and practitioners on what evidence there is for existing ecological connectivities across temperate habitats. This year, ZSL’s goal was to advance how we interpret the benefits of connecting restored habitats, and what collaborative action can we take to achieve restoration at a large scale.
Coastal habitats, such as saltmarshes, seagrass meadows, oyster reefs, kelp forests, all support a rich abundance of marine life and are critical for climate regulation, water quality and coastal defenses – their co-existences then create a well-balanced habitat mosaic. However, these habitats are greatly threatened. According to the IUCN Red List Assessment, the European native oyster ecosystem is classified as “collapsed”. 90% of UK seagrasses have been lost over the past 100 years, as well as 50% of global saltmarshes degraded, and kelp forests declining 1.8% every year. Knowing that we are halfway through the UN Decades on Ecosystem Restoration and Ocean Science for Sustainability, I wanted to find out more about how we are boosting restoration goals during this symposium.
The conference was two days long, with themes in principles of seascape restoration, advances in community-driven conservation, monitoring seascape environments, and enabling connectivity between them.
The first talks were topics I’ve heard a lot about – how much our marine environment has degraded. Hearing more about oyster losses across the UK shocked me. I learned when native oyster fishing accelerated around the 17th century, people could collect over 30,000 oysters a day! No wonder there are barely any oyster beds left now. It stressed to me the importance of large-scale restoration, because while there are localized projects involving oyster aquaculture and replantation, we need tactics that can result in country-wide impacts.
As we moved along, I heard more about specific research on how anthropogenic factors are stressing these coastal environments, monitoring present biodiversity and calculating future distributions. I learned about the use of environmental DNA as an easier method to detect species presence using genetic material left by organisms in the water column. I found out using technology such as baited remote underwater video systems (BRUVs) are now increasingly used as a permanent visual record of community composition. One novel technique that was introduced was the use of generalized deep-learning models to help in marine organism identifications from BRUVs. Instead of manually trying to identify fish species (which can take years!), AI detection systems can bypass turbidity, light, and speed issues.
Coming all the way from Australia, I then heard about habitat suitability models that have predicted long-term multispecies composition and resilience across coastlines until 2090. This was a great visual tactic to understand what a worst-case situation would look like, under the IPCC IS92a “business-as-usual” climate scenario. My one hope from this soon-to-be published data is that it can be as widely distributed, especially to policymakers, as possible.
The symposium ended with presentations from the Sussex Kelp Project and Scotland’s Seawilding Organization, both using replanting techniques for their restoration initiatives. What impressed me is that even with these talks being heavily science-based, they were backed up by presentations on how to overcome financial barriers that can scale up these nature-based solutions. Speakers from the Crown Estate and Blue Marine Foundation provided what realistically needs to happen for these projects to launch even further, whether getting more funding from government sources or establishing further connected community objectives. This section was especially eye-opening from not having an expert finance background.
These talks showed me how diverse the scientific community has been while attempting to improve these coastal habitats. I believe that continuing to bridge together all this information will absolutely help in more connected approaches to seascape restoration. It was great to be able to interact with everyone during breaks, find out more about their backgrounds, and learn what career opportunities there are in each of their spheres. As a student, it’s a bit nerve-wracking to be amongst professionals in the field, but overall, this symposium gave me great ideas and inspiration into what I want to achieve myself. As the next half of the UN Decade goes on, I am excited and hopeful as to what coastal restoration can evolve into by 2030.
changingoceans.com 