RaNTrans nutrients remediation workshops

The RaNTrans nutrients remediation workshops took place during November in England and France. During the workshops, an overview of the programme was presented, and stakeholders had the opportunity to discuss the preliminary project results and areas of information gaps. In England, the workshop was hosted by the lead partner University of Portsmouth (UoP) on 3 November at the Eldon building and conference suites with breakout sessions across 7 groups and a series of special topic presentations. While project partners at the University of Caen Normandy (UCN) hosted the workshops on 25 November in France using the hybrid in-person and online approach, that allowed a wide stakeholder participation from across Europe. The morning sessions covered various work package presentations and discussions, while in the afternoon participants (in-person and online) were treated to various posters showing preliminary project results. During both workshops, stakeholders shared various nutrient remediation ambitions and the opportunities that could be achieved when policies and investments are aligned with these ambitions. Stay tuned to read the summaries and recommendations generated from these workshops.

Conferences, presentations, and back in the field

The team at UoP have had a very busy few months from presenting work at ECSA 59 in Spain back in September to showcasing work at the ZSL Symposium with some field work squished in between. We followed up our algal mat removal work in September and November (so that’s 1 month and 3 month follow up done!) The samples have been sent off for analysis which means we are looking forward to getting it back to analyse.
Many of the RaNTrans solutions have potential for private and public investment, including cultivation of native oysters and seaweeds. At the Natural England All Marine Conference 2022 (day 1 and day 2), the public and private sector were encouraged to invest together in these nature-based solutions for nature recovery.

We also sampled the last of the oysters in Langstone and Hamble this week, which means a busy couple of days in the laboratory prepping the samples to be sent to France. The dangerous goods training is coming in handy as there are a lot of forms to fill out for shipping ethanol! Whilst we were out on the raft yesterday, we also deployed a trial which will measure the light at different depths for our sugar kelp growth trial in the new year where we will be testing this species ability to remediate nutrients. This is also being replicated in France with our partners Aleor which means we can compare intertidal and subtidal nutrient assimilation rates.

For more information on how we are working with stakeholders and delivering the project ambitions, see;

Use of very-high-resolution satellite images
for the detection of green algal mats
New methodology – ARGANS

It is time to get technical. Recently were shared an update about gathering drone footage and satellite images to improve accuracy of our algal mat predictive mapping tool. Well, here is more!
These are images of Lédano Cove – The Trieux river (FR)

Our satellite images are provided by the Planet company that allows us to see changes of the earth and make better decision.  The Planet constellation provides daily satellite data to help the users to understand the physical world and take action. The advantage of these images is that they have a spatial resolution of about 3 m with a daily repeatability. The latest generation sensor has 8 bands (compared to 4 before), 5 of which are interoperable with Sentinel-2, with an atmospheric correction. This makes it possible to calculate vegetation indices and to develop applications on the ocean allowing vegetation indices to be calculated and applications to be developed over the ocean. However, unlike the free sentinel-2 images, these are paid for with a minimum order of 4500 Euros (about 0.053 Euros per hectare). To process these images a new methodology has been developed based on a fuzzy classification. Three indices were calculated upstream NDVI, NDTI and NDWI2 . On one or more reference images, we select the set of pixels containing only green algae.

Next steps will be to apply the method to other planet images, and to other patterns such as saltmarsh, seagrass, and to classify other substrates such as sand and mud, to the planet images acquired on English sites and to adapt the method to Sentinel-2 images.

In this case we have taken the option of classifying as algae the pixel with a fuzzy index greater than 0.4 (Credit: ARGANS -Lédano Cove – The Trieux river (FR)
Ici, nous avons choisi de classer comme « algues » les pixels dont l’indice flou est supérieur à 0,4 (Crédit : ARGANS — Anse du Lédano – Estuaire Du Trieux [FR])

 Find out more!

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Have a lovely Christmas and looking forward to working with you in the New Year 2023.