👋 Meet the Team: Dr Ray Ward Ray leads SKRP's carbon sequestration research, helping us understand how Sussex's recovering seabed can contribute to climate resilience. He's also passionate about sharing Sussex's underwater world through his YouTube channel @drraymarine3271.

📣 Meet the Team: Sam Fanshawe As one of SKRP's Blue Marine Foundation representatives and a member of the project's Steering Group, Sam has been involved with the Sussex Kelp Recovery Project since its launch in 2021, helping to guide and support efforts to better understand and restore our kelp.

📣 Seaweed Spotlight: Meet Sugar Kelp, a common kelp found in the shallow seas around our coast. Attached to rocky seabeds by root-like holdfasts, it can be found from deep rockpools down to depths of around 30 metres, particularly on sheltered shores. 📸 (c)(c) Sarah Ward/Sussex Wildlife Trust

📣 Meet the Team: Nikki Oliver As SKRP's Project Support Officer, Nikki helps keep the wheels turning behind the scenes, managing administration, communications and enquiries, while keeping our partners, stakeholders and followers up to date with the project's progress. 💙

📣 Meet the Team: George Short As Kelp Recovery Coordinator for the Sussex Kelp Recovery Project, George keeps the partnership connected and the project moving forward, helping to ensure our objectives are achieved across research, monitoring, collaboration and engagement.

Kelp forests, just one of the essential fish habitats we hope to see recover along our Sussex coastline. Kelp create underwater forests that teem with life. Like trees on land, they provide shelter, food and nursery habitat for countless marine species and also deliver a host of ecosystem benefits.

📣 Say hello to Henri Brocklebank! Henri is Chair of the Sussex Kelp Recovery Project and Director of Conservation at Sussex Wildlife Trust. She's been supporting the project from the very beginning, helping to guide our vision and bring people together through open and inclusive collaboration.

🦑 Underwater masters of disguise! The Common Cuttlefish can change colour, pattern and texture in the blink of an eye, making it one of the ocean's most impressive shape-shifters. Read our latest blog by Dr Corina Ciocan, Principal Lecturer in Marine Biology, University of Brighton. 📸 Paul Parsons

🔬 Meet the Team: Dr Chris Yesson Our Research Lead, Chris, is a benthic ecologist and Senior Research Fellow at ZSL, exploring coastal and deep seabed habitats from the UK coast to the Arctic. As our Research Lead, he helps drive the science and our understanding of kelp recovery.

📣 Seaweed Spotlight: Furbellows (Saccorhiza polyschides) Also known as Furbellows or the "Sea Hedgehog", this annual kelp is easy to spot thanks to its distinctive hedge-hog-, brain- or alien-like holdfast, covered in smooth wart-like bumps as it matures. 📸 Furbellows, Northumberland beach (c) SWT

📣 To welcome our new followers, we thought it good manners to introduce the people behind the project. Welcome to Dr George Balchin, Conservation and Research Manager for Sussex IFCA who fills the post of Monitoring Lead within SKRP's Research & Monitoring Working Group.