SeagrassRestorer is an online platform to facilitate far better knowledge sharing of seagrass restoration projects, science and experiments from around the world. This portal builds on the SeagrassSpotter portfolio with the same login information and follows the same principles of open access data sharing.
The idea for this portal has arisen due to the increasing lack of reporting of seagrass restoration, leading to us, as a global community, largely only learning from success rather than failure. We as a community need to improve our sharing of information about where, when and how we have undertaken seagrass restoration, what has worked, and what has not worked. As projects continue to grow in abundance and financial investment expands in this area, its critical we begin to document where we’re doing restoration and the success or failure of this so we can learn together as a seagrass community. Importantly, this is required so that financial investments are grounded in science.
SeagrassRestorer is a means of facilitating community learning. This is not a database, but rather a register of projects and their key stats (method, project size, germination rate, survival rate… etc.) so people can see what others are doing and how different methods and concepts are being applied. With the social media landscape constantly changing, as well as the way that we share and digest science, we also envision this to be a handy way to signpost reports, talks, or papers about those projects. The platform is endorsed by Society of Ecological Restoration and the World Seagrass Association.
SeagrassRestorer and SeagrassSpotter both work from the same backend database and, therefore, operate in shared space with usable logins across both platforms. One benefit of this is the ability to view citizen science records from around your restoration sites (& advocate for citizen scientists to view your sites and take photos) within SeagrassRestorer.
SeagrassRestorer will facilitate projects and organisations to develop a strong identity for their site work to assist with reporting to donors and stakeholders.