Scotland’s longest running coastal habitat restoration project
Green Shores at the University of St Andrews is Scotland’s longest-running coastal habitat restoration project, with 25 years of saltmarsh restoration and research. Saltmarshes protect valuable land from coastal erosion and flooding, provide rare salt-adapted habitats, and serve as one of the best habitats in the UK for carbon storage in our rapidly changing climate.
The Green Shores team propagates plants, conducts research and monitoring, and installs storm fencing to protect newly planted marshes during their early stages. They have also formed a strong partnership with Dornoch Academy in the Highlands, where they established a second coastal plant hub. This hub offers local pupils opportunities to assist in growing transplants for the restoration effort.
The success of this initiative has garnered significant recognition, including an award for the renowned Royal Dornoch Golf Club, named Scotland’s Best Course by the Scottish Tourism Awards. The club won the Golf Environment Organisation’s Sustainable Project of the Year award for its work in tackling coastal erosion.
Green Shores’ efforts were featured as a NatureScot case study, and the team spent an engaging day working with a professional film crew to collect sediment samples from local sites. The full video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UK2KZNveEI).
The project’s success depends on the support of volunteers, who have dedicated over 280 hours in the past year to plant sites on the Eden and Tay Estuaries, the Dornoch Firth, collect sediment samples, and propagate hundreds of transplants at the hubs.