We’ve had an incredible, albeit busy, few months throughout the first half of our internship. We popped across to the other side of the UK in July for the ReMeMaRe (Restoring Meadow, Marsh, and Reef) conference that is held annually in Scarborough. Here we met up with all the other Marine Futures Interns from across the UK again for a few days of fascinating talks and to fully immerse ourselves in the marine world.  

We were also lucky enough to attend the National Eisteddfod in Wrexham early on in August, as well as soaking up the sun and Welsh culture. We dove in headfirst to our main project, having created a questionnaire for people from all over to fill out.  This also gave us the perfect opportunity to practice our Welsh language skills when flagging down members of the public to take part and give their opinions on the offshore renewable energy sector across Wales.  

Since then, we have been busy creating a more targeted questionnaire to gather opinions and knowledge of North Wales specific offshore renewable energy projects. Keep your eyes peeled for ways to get involved with our main project through this in the near future. 

We joined in on the shore search surveys, led by North Wales Wildlife Trust. At these volunteer sessions we conduct rocky shore intertidal monitoring surveys on areas around Ynys Mon, Pen Llyn and Conwy. This is a great opportunity to see beautiful new areas, learn more species ID skills and to chat with the passionate volunteers.   Some of my favorite species finds so far have been a blue rayed limpet and a baked bean squirt! We are learning the ins and outs of planning these volunteer sessions as we will be taking over running these in November! 

Bron’s been out salt marsh monitoring with the two previous Marine Futures Interns Rhys and Dylan at Traeth LLanddona and Traeth Dulas. With little previous knowledge of salt marshes, it was fascinating to learn how to identify many salt marshes species. We used a drop pin technique to survey the species at different zones along the saltmarsh.  

We love being out in the field and getting in the water, but we have also enjoyed gaining valuable skills through our office work. Bron has been assisting Natural Resources Wales (NRW) with updating their External Marine Evidence database which is a spreadsheet logging projects trying to fill in gaps within the offshore renewables sector. This is with the aim of identifying and filling in gaps in the current evidence and ensuring the outputs of the projects are archived effectively. NRW took us on a fun adventure down to the Dyfi Estuary where we conducted intertidal monitoring. We valued getting to work with experts in the field and learning more about intertidal species.  

Once a week we venture over to M-SParc in Gaerwen. With this partner we have been exploring recommendations from a report that was commissioned to identify how the region of North Wales could maximise the opportunities from the offshore renewable sector. Following a recommendation, we produced a tender brief for a new report focusing on the roles ports could play in maximising opportunities in the sector, with an enthesis on decommissioning.    

We have also been fortunate enough to help out with Project Seagrass’s annual seagrass seed collection event on the beautiful beach at Porthdinllaen. It was a great opportunity to squeeze into the old wetsuit for a snorkel over the seagrass meadow. 

Across two days, we saw a plethora of marine wildlife, including wrasse, anemones and the biggest plaice I’ve ever seen. 

Seeds collected by us and all volunteers involved have been sent down to south Wales for processing and will be used by Project Seagrass to reseed new and existing seagrass meadows across the UK, including around Ynys Môn and Pen Llŷn. We have even been back out on some of the potential new seagrass meadow sites with last year’s Marine Futures Intern, Rhys, to monitor planting success from a number of new experimental seeding methods. 

Greg has also been working with Morlais to develop an education session for primary schools across Ynys Môn. The aim is to inspire primary school children by sharing the conservation efforts being carried out by Morlais in preparation for the installation of tidal turbines and to explore a range of potential careers that such developments could bring to the region in the future. Together, we also attended the Green Horizons careers event in the Morlais Landfall Substation by South Stack, where we engaged with year 11s from a range of schools and to talk to them about the Marine Futures Internship.  

Last week marked the official half-way point of our internship as we welcomed the other Marine Futures Interns to North Wales and showed them around. Together, in front of a crowd of experts from the industry, we presented the preliminary findings from our main projects and updated one another on all our progress so far. It was a fantastic, if not nerve-racking opportunity to catch up and learn what we’ve all been working on since we first met at the start of the internship.