This visit provided opportunities to learn from Seawilding who are very experienced and have encountered great success in oyster restoration. We learnt about the best methods used to collect spat, which is something we have not yet done in our project. This has been crucial to develop our own methodology for spat collection during summer. We learnt more about their methods of community outreach and engagement by visiting their own education station situated by the loch. Here, we explored the materials they use for community outreach days, including adapted monitoring guidance that members of the public can use. We also discussed in depth what works and what doesn’t when it comes to connecting people to our projects. Having these conversations with others in the field has provided inspiration and guidance for future events that CAOLAS will arrange, including creating volunteer events for spat collector set up. We do not think that any training is needed to pursue the methods we learnt about during our visit- however we did learn a lot about the requirements needed to set up a small scale hatchery.

We met an intern working with Seawilding, and we learnt about the challenges and opportunities that working with students presents. Since CAOLAS have aspirations to do this in the future, these were helpful conversations to have with others doing this first hand. We also met a hatchery expert who was visiting, allowing us to discuss logistics of small scale hatchery set up – another long term vision of CAOLAS. This was particularly interesting given the issues with spat procurement, providing us with some useful information to feed back to our trustees. CEO of Seawilding, Danny Renton was also on site, allowing us to chat with him. This was particularly positive since he offered to help us with spat procurement in the future. Having a larger group share some deliveries of spat with us is proving to be an effective method to overcome supply issues. Therefore, networking was another benefit of our exchange.

Learning Outcomes

• Analysis of methodologies used for monitoring
• How to effectively engage volunteers for personal growth and wider benefit to the community. Developing pro environmental attitudes and behaviours to create a community of nature stewards.
• Training requirements to implement appropriate methodologies

"We benefited from some much needed inspiration from a hugely successful community focused project - showing us that our hard work can have even more far reaching positive benefits with an extended funding period. We left feeling uplifted!"