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This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360. Read the original story here.

On a recent summer morning near Camden, New Jersey, two divers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hovered over a patch of sediment 10 feet below the surface of the Delaware River. With less than 2 feet of visibility in the churning estuary, they were transplanting a species crucial to the ecosystem: Vallisneria americana, or wild celery grass. One diver held a GoPro camera and a flashlight, capturing a shaky clip of the thin, ribbon-like blades bending with the current.

Watching the divers’ bubbles surface from the EPA’s boat was Anthony Lara, experiential programs supervisor at the Center for Aquatic Sciences at Adventure Aquarium in Camden, who had nurtured these plants for months in tanks, from winter buds to mature grasses some 24 inches long.

“It’s a little nerve-wracking,” he says of releasing the grasses into the wild, where they could get nudged out by a competing plant or eaten by a duck. “But that’s life.”

This was the first planting of a new restoration project led by Upstream Alliance, a nonprofit focused on public access, clean water, and coastal resilience in the Delaware, Hudson, and Chesapeake watersheds. In collaboration with the Center for Aquatic Sciences, and with support from the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic team and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the alliance is working to repopulate areas of the estuary with wild celery grass, a plant vital to freshwater ecosystems. It’s among the new, natural restoration projects focused on bolstering plants and wildlife to improve water quality in the Delaware River, which provides drinking water for some 15 million people.

Such initiatives are taking place across the United States, where, 50 years after passage of the Clean Water Act, urban waterways are continuing their comeback, showing increasing signs of life. Yet ecosystems still struggle, and waters are often inaccessible to the communities that live around them. Increasingly, scientists, nonprofits, academic institutions, and state agencies are focusing on organisms like bivalves (such as oysters and mussels) and aquatic plants to help nature restore fragile ecosystems, improve water quality, and increase resilience.

Bivalves and aquatic vegetation improve water clarity by grounding suspended particles, allowing more light to penetrate deeper. They also have exceptional capacity to cycle nutrients—both by absorbing them as food and by making them more available to other organisms. Thriving underwater plant meadows act as carbon sinks and provide food and habitat for scores of small fish, crabs, and other bottom-dwellers. Healthy bivalve beds create structure that acts as a foundation for benthic habitat and holds sediment in place.

“Why not take the functional advantage of plants and animals that are naturally resilient and rebuild them?” says Danielle Kreeger, science director at the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, which is spearheading a freshwater mussel hatchery in southwest Philadelphia. “Then you get erosion control, water quality benefits, fish and wildlife habitat, as well as better access for people.”

One hundred miles north of Philadelphia, the Billion Oyster Project has been restoring the bivalves in New York Harbor since 2010, engaging more than 10,000 volunteers and 6,000 students in the project. Oyster nurseries are being installed in Belfast Lough in Northern Ireland, where until recently they were believed to have been extinct for a century. And a hatchery 30 miles west of Chicago has dispersed 25,000 mussels into area waterways, boosting the populations of common freshwater mussel species.

Underwater vegetation restoration projects have been underway in the Chesapeake Bay and Tampa Bay for years, and more recently in California, where seagrass species are in sharp decline. (Morro Bay, for example, has lost more than 90% of its eelgrass beds in the past 15 years.) The California Ocean Protection Council’s 2020 Strategic Plan to Protect California’s Coast and Ocean aims to preserve the mere 15,000 acres of known seagrass beds and cultivate 1,000 more acres by 2025.

Scientists stress that these projects must be implemented alongside strategies to continue curbing contaminants, mainly excess nutrients from sewage and fertilizers, flowing into our waterways—still the most critical step in improving water quality. After several decades of aquatic vegetation plantings in the Chesapeake Bay, for example, scientists say the modest increase of plants is largely due to nature restoring itself following a reduction in nutrient pollution.

And any human intervention in a complex ecosystem raises a host of compelling concerns, such as how to ensure sufficient genetic diversity and monitor competition for food and resources. Scientists say that, in many cases, they’re learning as they go.

Still, in areas where the natural environment is improving, bringing back bivalves and aquatic plants can create a lasting foundation for entire ecosystems. And restoration initiatives are an active form of stewardship that connects people to their waterways, helping them understand the ecosystems we depend on for our survival.

Natural Capacity for Cleaning

Until five years ago, the extent of wild celery grass beds in the Delaware estuary was a bit of a mystery. Many scientists didn’t think the water quality was suitable, and because the estuary contains a lot of sediment and roils with the tides, the plants weren’t visible in aerial imagery.

But in 2017, EPA researchers started surveying by boat to detect submerged vegetation and were surprised to find the plant thriving in parts of a 27-mile stretch of the Delaware River from Palmyra, New Jersey, past Camden and Philadelphia, to Chester, Pennsylvania. That’s the only section of the river designated by the Delaware River Basin Commission as unsafe for “primary contact recreation”—activities like Jet Skiing, kayaking, and swimming.

The discovery of healthy grass beds was exciting, says Kelly Somers, the EPA Mid-Atlantic Region’s senior watershed coordinator, because the plant is an indicator of water quality. The EPA’s research, accessible via online maps, has been especially helpful for the Upstream Alliance’s restoration work, says founder and President Don Baugh, because most of the research on wild celery grass is from other places—primarily the Chesapeake Bay. The restoration of wild celery and other aquatic plant species has been underway there for more than 30 years.

Among the Chesapeake’s experts is Mike Naylor, aquatic biologist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, who, back in the 1990s, was pulling National Archives images of the Chesapeake Bay to find out what bay grass beds looked like in the 1930s and ’50s. When combined with similar research by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, he found that at least 200,000 acres of underwater vegetation flourished in the bay in those decades, dropping to about 38,000 by 1984.

When I talked to Naylor in mid-July, he had just been out with volunteers from the ShoreRivers group harvesting redhead grass (Potamogeton perfoliatus)—enough to fill the back bed of a pickup truck, which will yield a couple of gallons of seeds for replanting, he says.

In recent years, scientists on the Chesapeake Bay have switched from transplanting adult plants to direct seeding, which is far less resource intensive and laborious. “You can spread tens of acres of seeds in one day with just three people,” Naylor says.

More efficient techniques combined with site selection informed by accumulated data on plants’ requirements could significantly boost the success of restoration efforts. Still, scientists agree that the modest increases in seagrass growth over the past 30 years are mainly due to natural repopulation following improvements in water quality.

“In the Chesapeake Bay, the thing that has led to wide-scale [aquatic vegetation] recoveries is nutrient-load reductions,” says Cassie Gurbisz, assistant professor in the environmental studies program at Saint Mary’s College in Maryland.

Excess nutrients—mainly nitrogen and phosphorus from sewage and agricultural runoff—are among the biggest detriments to water quality. And it’s a problem that bivalves can help address. The Billion Oyster Project, which has restored oysters at 15 reef sites, is working to determine how oysters affect—and are affected by—water quality. The project’s goal is to restore 1 billion oysters to New York Harbor by 2035.

A 2017 pilot project in the Bronx River Estuary studied the cleaning capabilities of the marine ribbed mussel. Researchers estimated that 337,000 adult ribbed mussels floating in the estuary could sequester 138 pounds of nitrogen in their tissues and shells in six months. As it eats, a single mussel can filter up to 20 gallons per day, remove excess nitrogen both by assimilating it into their shells and tissues and burying it in the sediment as waste. Because they’re especially sensitive to poor water quality, freshwater mussel species are among the most endangered groups of animals.

“In some watersheds, the reasons why they went away are still there, and so they’re not really yet restorable,” says Kreeger of the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, which has been researching freshwater mussels in the region for 15 years. The reasons include habitat destruction caused by dredging or filling, sedimentation or siltation from runoff, and climate change factors, like warming water and increased stormwater runoff.

“In many areas, water quality has come back enough and habitat is stable enough that you can rebuild,” says Kreeger. The partnership’s proposed hatchery and education center would have the capacity to propagate 500,000 native mussels each year.

Kreeger says the hatchery team is working on biosecurity and genetics-preservation plans to address the concern that releasing large numbers of hatchery-raised mussels could dilute genetic diversity and introduce diseases in the wild.

“Propagation or restoration projects should maintain the current genetic makeup and diversity and should not disrupt the natural and evolutionary processes,” says Kentaro Inoue, research biologist at the Daniel P. Haerther Center for Conservation and Research at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. He’s working with the Urban Stream Research Center’s hatchery—which has released about 25,000 mussels into Chicago-area waterways—to analyze DNA samples from restoration sites.

The key issue is that many propagated animals have exactly the same maternal genetics. (The first 24,000 juveniles released by the hatchery were the progeny of just four mother mussels.) The center is working to mitigate some of these concerns by tagging their mussels so as not to propagate animals with the same genetics in a subsequent season. Even still, “We need to conduct more post-release monitoring after releasing hatchery-reared juveniles into the wild,” says Inoue.

Despite these concerns, scientists say bringing back bivalve and aquatic vegetation communities is an important tool to continue improving water quality. Says Kreeger, “We’re restoring nature’s ability to keep itself clean.”

This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360. Read the original story here.

A WILDLIFE photographer who survived a stroke says he has been given a second chance at life.

Now 59-year-old Simon Booker, from South Stoke, is raising funds for the Stroke Association by selling calendars featuring his nature photography.

Mr Booker, who is married with three children, works in sales and management but has been photographing wildlife in his spare time for about five years.

He studied mechanical engineering and naval architecture at university and enjoys the technical side of photography.

He said: “I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos and it turned me into a photography geek. If you want to get the best out of a camera, you have to get to know it.

“I can take a picture that looks okay and I can get it to something brilliant because I know what I’m doing now after three years of spending an inordinate amount of time farting around.

“I used to work with a photographer in Paris who said to me, ‘You don’t take pictures, you create them’.”

Mr Booker’s interest in photography started with his father, a keen amateur and member of Wallingford Camera Club, who converted the family bathroom into a dark room.

He said: “We always used to have these family portrait sessions with lights, where my dad would try to create black and white portraits. I used to go to the bathroom to watch him develop the photos. I would be really excited.

“When I moved here, I would take the dog for walks and take my iPhone with me, photographing anything that interested me.

“I’d just got into social media at the same time, so I’d always post the photos on there.

“Once I asked this social influencer, ‘What do you call people like me who are old farts who know how to use social media?’ She said, ‘You have a millennial mindset, Simon’ and I went, ‘That sounds cool, I’ll run with that’.

“It just means I embrace technology and love the things young people do with stuff. I love new things.

“When I put a picture on Facebook and loads of people go, ‘Wow, I didn’t know we had those animals just down the road’, I get a real kick out of that.”

Mr Booker had just turned 59 when he suffered a stroke on May 26 last year.

He had been previously diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which is an irregular heartbeat and the underlying cause of the stroke.

The stroke was a surprise but there had been warning signs.

Mr Booker said he had been working late when he noticed a “flashing polygon” in his head and felt “woozy and giddy”.

The doctors initially thought his eyesight prescription needed updating before checking his heart and discovering the murmur.

Mr Booker said he was told that he “might need to think about that at some point” but put it off and went back to work.

On the night of his stroke, he was working in his home office at about 8pm.

He said: “My wife was out in the village. I came into the kitchen and was looking at myself in the mirrored wall. I couldn’t see through one eye — it was like a blind spot.

“I thought, ‘That’s a bit weird’ and then I looked down and I had a bit of dribble on my shirt. I thought it was sweat, then I went, ‘Oh, I think I’m dribbling, actually’, so I think my face had sagged.

“Then I went ‘Oh, s***, I can’t move my arm.

“You don’t know what’s going on. I went back into the office and sat there. I meant to log into the computer and continue working.

“I stood in the corner and it felt like I was on a boat. Things felt a bit giddy for a minute and I went back to my desk. I never logged in, I just sat there. My wife came home, popped her head around the door and asked how I was. All I could do was groan. She immediately phoned 999.”

Mr Booker was taken by ambulance to the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, where doctors gave him a thrombectomy, which is where the head is injected with blood thinners to reduce the size of the clot.

After he had stabilised, he couldn’t speak for a few hours, which scared him as he was completely conscious.

“I knew exactly what was going on,” he said. “My brain couldn’t work out what words to use, so I just couldn’t say anything, which was really weird. It was surreal.

“I could try but all the words would come out in the wrong order. All the connections were temporarily broken.

“The next day, a nurse asked me where I thought I was. I told her that I knew the place and could drive to it but that I had completely forgotten its name.

“She pointed to the curtain and asked me to name it. Again, I knew what a curtain was used for but didn’t know its bloody name.

“We were joking about it because I had basically got back to normal by that point but it was like my glossary had been erased. I couldn’t name anything.

“On day three, everything came back.”

Mr Booker said he had been lucky. “The ambulance happened to be driving nearby, my wife is great in crisis management and the Royal Berks is the best place in the country for strokes,” he said.

“I was at home but the day before at that same time I was in the middle of a field and no one knew where I was. If it happened then, it could have been a very different story.

“My number was called but luckily I got a second chance.”

Mr Booker said that suffering a stroke made him realise that he wasn’t “Superman”.

He said: “I have been extremely fortunate in how it has worked out for me. So many people end up in a bad way. Seventy per cent of disabilities in the UK are the result of strokes and it’s the fourth biggest killer. You don’t think it could happen to you.

“All young people go, ‘You must be an old fart if you’ve had a stroke’. Well, yes, but young people have them as well and you don’t quite know what can cause them. I still don’t really know what caused mine.”

He suspects a contributing factor was his lifestyle and lack of sleep.

“I used to tell people, ‘Sleep is overrated’,” said Mr Booker. “Now I am eating my words. I would work hard, play hard. I’d go to the bar, watch the football, get to bed at 2am and then get up at 6am to do a presentation at 8am. I’d compress sleep.

“At weekends I’d start getting up at dawn, especially in the summer, because the animals are out early. I’d have a busy week and then get up at 4am to go and take pictures.

“I was getting quite tired but it wasn’t because I couldn’t sleep. I could sleep fine but just didn’t do it as I thought I didn’t need it.”

Now he tries to moderate his life, in particular his attitude towards sleep, and has improved his diet, losing two stone.

Mr Booker said: “If I know I am getting up early, I go to bed early. People say to me, ‘God, you look amazing, you look really alive’. I say, ‘Well, I’m not carrying as much weight and I’m getting seven hours’ sleep every night’.

“Sometimes as you get older, you need to just take it a little bit easier.

“I said to a stroke consultant that I had dodged a bullet. She said she didn’t like that phrase as it was a bit negative. She said, ‘Why don’t you say you’ve been given a second chance?’. It’s much more aspirational and positive. Lots of other people, sadly, don’t get a second chance.”

Taking pictures of wildlife helps him to remain calm.

Mr Booker said: “People say to me, ‘You must have incredible patience to sit for three hours waiting for a kingfisher’ but I love every minute.

“It’s not boring and it’s just me and nature. I enjoy the relaxation.

“When you watch a deer doing something and it doesn’t know you’re there and you get pictures, I just think it’s awesome.

“It’s even more awesome than when you chuck them on Facebook and people enjoy them. It’s just a win-win all the way.

“I like wildlife photography because it is as much about finding the animal as taking the perfect photograph, especially in the case of rarer ones.

“I take photos of these animals because they might not exist one day. I show the hidden world to people who might not be aware of it. I like the payback of the fact that I’m getting better at it. I’m quite good at it, allegedly.

“I got testimonials during lockdown when people couldn’t go out. There was a guy who said, ‘Just keep posting the pictures, you don’t know how much they help me’.”

Mr Booker has been producing calendars for four years and last year sold them in aid of a men’s health charity after his brother had a health scare.

To buy one of his 2023 calendars, visit https://bit.ly/3B0OZ9W

To see more of his pictures, visit https://www.stokerpix.com