Seagrass restoration starts with mapping suitable habitat

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 11:42

   for all the geeks i'd love to hear why seagrass and like how it compares as a as a carbon sequester compared to everything else out there yeah seagrass is uh you know it's like your rapper's favorite rapper or something like that it's like the most like slept on like plant i think there um it's it does it's zero attention carl you know is the is the very like uh good-looking friend or something like that that gets all the attention but seagrass is really who you should be talking to um uh carl gets a lot of the funding and seagrass is really this unsung hero of the ocean it covers uh you know two percent of the the sea floor but holds uh twenty percent of the ocean's uh carbon um it is the uh the ocean being the world's largest natural carbon sink anyway um so it's like very important in that regard about 20 of commercially important

2. 12:29

   fish stocks rely on seagrasses as a habitat. And so it's just very, very important. Very important species doesn't really get that much attention. It grows on up and down the coastlines of Ireland, the UK, here in California, actually the same species in Ireland and California, on the East Coast, in Australia. So yeah, we're working across. We've got projects in Virginia, in Southern Florida, in California now, in Sausalito, and a few other locations also in When you started the company to use seagrass restoration and you're now mostly focused on the robot, you haven't left seagrass because you're now working on seagrass projects.

3. 13:04

   Yeah, like fundamentally the tech platform we're building, again, because we made these early design decisions, mean that like, well, you know, it's like you kind of like you build the technology once that does like the seagrass restoration and then like, then it's just more of like scaling that business is more of like an operational problem. like there's not any new net new R&D we have to do to serve new contracts in that. We've already built the underlying IP. It's just like, do you have enough operators that can go in the field and operate it? And the core platform, you know, under vehicle, sensing stack, nav stack, autonomy, and surface vehicle is like, you know, and it's something that can then go off and work at the folks in the energy sector or defense sector. What do you have to do to restore seagrass?

4. 13:43

   You have to collect this. First of all, you have to understand where to restore. So you have to map and understand where is their sea grass, where is their not. On top of that, then you'd run a pretty rudimentary model called a habitat suitability model to say, well, based on the depth and the water clarity and these other features, we think these areas would be good for restoration. Then you identify where are the plants flowering and producing seeds.

5. 14:08

   And you go and collect the seeds. And you see videos of this on the ULCS Twitter account. We just posted a seed collection video just like yesterday. And then you bring the seeds then to the locations that need seeds that you've identified in the HubDat suitability model. And then you deposit them there. And then all going well.