User:Ghostpants321/Sea rewilding

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Sea rewilding (also known as marine rewilding) is an ecological restoration activity that focuses on restoring, preserving and protecting marine ecosystems. Since their early inception in attraction in the early 1990s, sea rewilding projects have gained many methods and techniques, from habitat restoration to managing regulations to reintroducing species and much more. Many methods and techniques rely heavily on self-sustainability, constant human activities, and the domestication of species. Those methods were designed to counteract human influences that may bring harm to the environment and its biodiversity.

Sea rewilding of marine or coastal ecosystems offer other potential ways to mitigate climate change, such as sequestering carbon and limiting commercial activities to reduce further stress on the marine environment.

However, sea rewilding also brings many harms to the environment, such as invasive species and uncontrollable acceleration in a species population. Species such as kelp. If left unchecked, it can bring much devastation to the ocean. A large concentration of kelp forests can draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and create an imbalance that may poison the water with carbon excess gas.

Background

First cases of rewilding were introduced in the early 1990s, the first projects were based on the conservation of terrestrial landscapes. Sea rewilding is an expansion of rewilding towards salt based marine environments.

The methods of sea rewilding can effect mulitple biodiversity at the same time, from coastal to deep sea areas. Sea rewilding projects held near costal communities can economically benefit local businesses as well as communities. However, throughout the years, many corporations and governement has used sea rewilding in order to promote green washing, tourism and etc. Launched in 2010, the Scotland Blue Recovery has gained much attention early on, but throughout many years, there have been many delays. In 2023, many backflashes and oppositions were created in response to the tardiness.

Methods

Habitat restoration methods/techniques

Seagrass at LaCiotat in France. On March 1, the World Seagrass Day is an event held annually to raise awareness about seagrass and its important functions in the marine ecosystem. Many seagrass meadows exist in France (around 86 species); these seagrass help in mitigating climate change and contributing to France's blue carbon.

Domesticated Seagrass

Seagrass provides multipes services towards the environment such as coastal protection, animal habitat, and carbon capture. The density of the worldwide population of seagrass was halfed since the last century, such loss could have brought "3.6%–8.4% of the CO2 sequestration required by 2030".

Around 44% of seagrass species possess reproductive traits for domestication and rewilding. The increase of domesticating seagrass can further enhance seagrass meadows population worldwide. By relying not only on natural recovery of the popualtion, seagrass can further store carbon dioxide.

More than 90% of the United Kingdom's historic seagrass meadows have been lost, restoring seagrass meadows could offset carbon emissions and provide habitat for numerous fish and shellfish species. Seagrass as a species covers a large part of the sea floor, many suggests that it provids 18% of carbon storage of the ocean, around 7% of the total population of seagrass is loss each year. Seagrass meadows have been declining since the 1930s, due to their population declining each year they have been designated a UK habitat of principal importance.

Kelp forests

Kelp forests are important habitats which have been lost over time in coastal waters. Kelp forests provids many habitats for different species such as fishes and other organism. It also protects coastlines from erosion and trap carbon dioxide from the ocean. Restoring kelp forests is a strategy to address climate change and enrich ocean livestock, due to their potential of absorbing large amount of carbon.

This image represents a part of a mangrove forest supporting a shoreline. By observing the photo, the roots of the mangrove trees support a shoreline ecosystem by providing erosion control, umbrella protection, and increasing sediment accumulation. The location is near the San Salvador Island.

Mangrove trees

Sea rewilding contributes to the mitigation of mangrove ecosystem losses. Mangrove trees are efficient in trapping carbon dioxide in and provide habitat for a large amount of species: from fishes to land animals. The trees in the mangrove ecosystem also helps in protecting land erosion, natural breeding grounds for species, influences from storms.

Near the waters of Bengal, it said that "over the past 30 years, 23.55 percent of the mangrove forest cover has been lost". People of Bengals scouts the low tide in search of mangrove tree seeds and overturned saplings, "800,000 saplings have been planted since 2014", in hopes of restoring the ocean life around the area and its natural barriers.

Reintroduced species

Native oysters

Oysters filter water, recycle nutrients and help to protect against coastal erosion. Oyster stocks have declined by 95% in Europe due to over-harvesting, habitat loss, pollution and disease.

In Rhode Island, US, "wild oyster populations are at an all-time low", according to Eric Schneider, the principal marine biologist with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management's Division of Marine Fisheries. Schneider also states: "oysters provide a number of essential ecosystem services, from water filtration to fish habitat and shoreline protection. By having oyster reef habitat absent from these systems, those services can be significantly depressed".

Near the reefs of North-East Whiteburn, UK, "The Wild Oyster Project" program has released around 10,000 of oysters on to the reef in 2023. It has been demonstrated that restoring historic oyster beds improves water quality.

Native sharks

Due to heavy fishery activities and pollution, the shark population has been on the declineIn the marine environment, Sharks are known to be one of the dominant predators of its environment. Throughout oceans, Sharks helps to serve as apex predators, mitigate prey animals, bring nutrients to ecosystems and much more.

In Indonesia, domesticated sharks raised in facilities were released into the wild in hopes of promoting local tourism, healthier encosystem and a return to the natural state of the biodiversity of the area,

This image represents a sea goose eating sea lettuce, an algae commonly found all over the coasts of the world. A sea goose, or waterfowl, is an artic bird whose populations are found in coastal and semi-deep waters, most of its species are found near Pacific coasts.

Native sea birds

Sea birds population occupy a large portion of the various sea ecosystems, from seed dispersal of various sea plants to various nutrient transfer. The most common seed plants using birds as a main seed dispersal are diverse and numerous, such as sea beans, Mucunas, Zosteras, seagrasses and other sea plants uses birds as another way to disperse their seeds in further distances. Sea birds contributes also in assuring and maintaining a healthier ecosystem, assuring a population regulation and proper marine derived nutrients onto dry land.

The Maui Nui Seabirds Recovery Project is an organization in rewilding, protecting, and increaing the population of seabirds in Maui Nui. The threat most common to the population of seabird on the islands of Maui Nui is noise pollution, non-native predation (from rats to cats), and man-made development. The association has implemented multiple methods in increasing the popualtion of various species such as re-locating injured birds, creating new nesting grounds and raising awareness.

Human activities

Aquaculture

In the marine environment, plants and animal species are in global decline throughout the world. These losses can be translated to reduced benefits in the ecosystem, such as carbon sequestration, waste management, water detoxification, providing habitats and much more. However, studies show that domesticating species can further mitigate the loss of environment biodiversity.

By using farming and other forms of nurseries in an artificial environment, it can enable domesticated species to "subsequent large-scale rewilding may form a successful shortcut to restore threatened keystone species and their vital ecosystem services".

Domisticated Seagrass is a ressource management that enables faster breeding and seed production in a control environment than in natural conditions. Meadows of seagrass can be enhanced in numbers with the implementation with human processing, harvesting, storage technology, "44% of seagrass species have promising reproductive traits for domestication and rewilding by seeds".

Marine protected areas

Marine protected areas are ecosytem-based management that are used to preserve, conserve marine ecosystems and mitigate from further disrupted activities. Distrupted activities such as: overfishing, ocean pollution, and other similar disturbances. Many marine protected areas exist worldwide, the first protected area was Yellowstone National Park in the United States in 1872 and the first protected area with a marine ecosystem was the Royal National Park (MPA), in New South Wales Australia, in 1879.

South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are islands situated below South America British territory where its marine ecosystem are protected by using fishing licenses to limit the timing and quantity of fish being caught and establishing routes for scenic ships such as cruise ships. The Patagonian toothfish, or 'white gold', a highlt orized fish species native to the region has seen a small increase in its population due to decreasing the catch limit and fishing seasons.

Challenges

Climate change

Sea rewilding enables marine ecosystems to further mitigate the rise of acidification in the water, isolating dioxide and much more. "Climate change and overfishing are the two most significant challenges to the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems". The impact of climate change onto the ocean is numerous and harmfull to marine biodiversity and to the world.

In the United States, Chesapeake Bay is considered one of the most polluted bays in North America. Due to the abundance of industrial and human activities, the water is contaminated with much unknown quantity of microplastic, flame retardants, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals waste. Many solutions have been proposed such as retention ponds or usage of biofiltration, but much are still ongoing projects.

This image taken in Torquay shows a man protesting in against carbon capture and storage. The protest was by the Otway Climate Emergency Action Network (OCEAN) at the CO2CRC AGM and Symposium (Carbon Capture and Storage Conference) on November 2021.

Excess of carbon dioxide

Rewilding the sea has been described as "the new way to capture carbon". In sea rewilding, carbon capture and storage is the process of storing and isolating carbon dioxide. Carbon capture in the ocean and other various marine environement plays a role in limiting and mitigating the increase amount of CO2 present in the atmosphere.

Each year, oceans and other sea environments "absorb 20-35% anthopogenic CO2 emissions". The marine environement possesses an aptitude in storing and dissolving large quantities of the earths carbon, the main filtration process is largely organic.

Public awareness and engagement

In most cases, sea rewilding consist of long term programs with multiple collaboration, public awarenes, funding and lobbying new or old laws regarding the integration of a new species of flora or fauna. From politicians to policy makers, sea rewilding awareness Implements new programs that requires large amount of collaboration between experts and locals. "Ecosystem Service valuation can improve societal choices through presenting the costs of ecosystem degradation and the benefits of restoration in economic terms".

Organisation such as Wild Oyster Projects are run and funding by the collaboration by experts and locals.

Deep sea mining

The image represents a common deep sea mining operation. As we can observe: a mining platform ship will release a hydraulic pump system deep into the ocean, the pump will only stop when it reaches an appropriate amount of distance in so to connect a flexible pump towards a mining vehicle onto the sea floor. The mining vehicle is a remote operated vehicle equip with suction tools, pumps like vacuums and cutterheads. In the picture, we can see high traces of sediment plumes being lifted of the sea floor. The cutterheads will crush the rocks and then the pumps will vacuum the debris into the pump system to the ship up to the suface. Any unwanted sediments will later be discharged from the ship through a pipe system leading directly under the ship.

The process in deep sea mining consist of extracting and assessing minerals in areas with depths over 200 meters of more. The potential risk sources regarding deep sea mining are numerous: from habitat removal, high cost, plume impacts, light polution and many more. However, deep sea mining wields much minerals that are and the consequence damage onto marine ecosytem are seen less than terrestrial ecosytems consequence are .

Deep sea mining creates large amount of light pollution, noise and destruction that may destroy or display many species. sponge reef are one of the most vulnerable to this enterprise due their habitat, vulnerability and lack of movement.

Assessing the long term damage done by deep sea mining are hard to grasp still to this day. In certain areas, sea rewilding may not be possible.

Organisations

• Seawilding, a Scottish charity work with communities
• NatureScot
• Rewilding Britain
• Wild Oyster Project
• Billion Oyster Project
• Rewilding the global alliance
• Marine Stewardship Council
• Maui Nui Seabirds Recovery Project

See also

• Rewilding
• Salmon conservation
• Blue carbon
• Reef burials
• Deep sea mining

Further reading[edit]

• Clover, Charles (9 June 2022). Rewilding the Sea. Penguin Books.
• Attenborough, Charles & Hughe, jonnie. (2020). A life on our Planet: my witness statement and a vision for the future. Unabridged

References

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• Clover, Charles. (2022). REWILDING THE SEA: How to save our oceans.

• Katwijk, M. M., Tussenbroek, B. I., Hanssen, S. V., Hendriks, A. J., & Hanssen, L. (2021). Rewilding the Sea with Domesticated Seagrass. Bioscience, 71(11), 1171–1178.
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