Journal of Emerging Scholarship

Submerged Aquatic Vegetation (SAV) is critical to maintaining water quality and providing food and shelter for numerous estuarine organisms. As part of a larger project to restore SAV in the Chesapeake Bay, the goals of this research project were to identify healthy beds for seed harvesting, harvest seeds from four native SAV species and refine the seed so that it could be stored until dispersal for restoration purposes. Through collaboration between Shore Rivers, Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Anne Arundel Community College Environmental Center, seeds collected in the summer of 2021 will be dispersed in 2022, with the ultimate goal of restoring one acre of SAV. Four types of native aquatic plants, Ruppia maritima (widgeon grass), Zannichellia palustris (horned pondweed), Stuckenia pectinata (sago pondweed), and Potamogeton perfoliatus (redhead grass) were collected into 20 baskets per species and then processed in a turbulator to separate the seed. After turbulating, the plant material was further pro- cessed through a series of screens to refine the pure seed, which was later isolated and placed into jars with a salt solution. Over the winter, seeds were stored in the jars until they will be mixed with sand and dispersed into the bay for future restoration proj- ects. More than 1,000,000 seeds were collected this summer from all four species combined, and over 100 hours of volunteer time went into the seed processing/refining process.

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