Future Tides - The Next Step in Upscaling Scottish Seagrass Restoration

Robocean’s is proud to announce Future Tides, a flagship 1.5-hectare seagrass restoration project in Montrose Basin, Scotland, delivered in partnership with the Scottish Marine Environmental Enhancement Fund. 

Over the next two years, Robocean will turn Montrose Basin into a living lab to validate its innovative Meadow Maker seagrass restoration technology at scale in a complex intertidal environment. This project brings together marine robotics, habitat restoration, and applied field science in one of Scotland’s most important coastal landscapes.

Montrose Basin (Scottish Wildlife Trust)

About Montrose Basin

Montrose Basin is a site of exceptional scientific and ecological interest, making it an ideal location for testing scalable seagrass restoration methods. Its sheltered estuarine setting, tidal dynamics, and intertidal flats create a challenging but ideal environment for restoration work. The site is also highly important for biodiversity, particularly for seabirds that depend on the broader estuarine ecosystem and the rich feeding opportunities it supports. As a result, Montrose Basin offers not only a practical restoration site, but also a living system in which innovative restoration methods can be validated with reduced risk.

How Meadow Maker is expanding Scottish seagrass restoration capacity

Robocean’s Meadow Maker platform is designed to scale seagrass restoration beyond the limits of manual planting. Traditional seagrass restoration methods are often labour-intensive, slow, and difficult to repeat consistently across large areas. In soft intertidal environments the problem is even greater, where limited access and volatile conditions can create dangerous working environments. Meadow Maker addresses that challenge by mechanising the restoration process, improving planting efficiency, repeatability, and operational coverage while reducing the logistical burden associated with large-scale restoration. The use case is particularly strong in coastal and estuarine settings where restoration needs to be delivered reliably, at pace, and with the ability to adapt to site-specific conditions.

The future of seagrass restoration in Scotland and across the wider UK will depend on solutions that can move from demonstration projects to scalable operations, and Meadow Maker is engineered to directly fill that gap. Future Tides intends to create that pathway to wider Meadow Maker adoption, showing how robotics can support practical habitat recovery at a scale that aligns with environmental need, project economics, and long-term restoration planning.

Montrose Basin (Scottish Wildlife Trust)

Restoration Methodology and Timeline

The practical work in Future Tides will include donor material collection, seeding, and transplanting, with initial survey work due to begin in July 2026. Donor material will include both seeds and sods, allowing the project to use a restoration strategy that is responsive to local ecological conditions and tailored to the needs of the Montrose Basin site. This combination of approaches it vital, as seagrass restoration success depends on using the right material, in the right place, at the right time, and with careful attention to site suitability and environmental conditions.

The project timeline is structured to support both scientific learning and delivery. Initial surveys will establish baseline conditions and inform restoration design before work progresses into collection, seeding, and transplantation phases. All restoration work is scheduled to be completed by March 2028, giving the project enough time to refine methods, assess performance, and demonstrate how robotic restoration can operate over a sustained multi-year programme.

Building on Previous Collaboration

Future Tides also builds on Robocean’s earlier experience as a recipient of the Nature Restoration Fund with NatureScot. That support helped advance the company’s restoration capability and provided important momentum for the development of Robocean’s technology and field methods. It also helped establish the practical foundations for working in real marine environments, where ecological objectives, operational constraints, and technical performance all need to align.

Wider Project

Robocean’s Future Tides project sits within SSEN and SMEEF’s Seagrass Meadows Scotland programme, a £2.4 million partnership designed to protect and restore Scotland’s seagrass habitats. By restoring 1.5 hectares at Montrose Basin, Future Tides contributes to the programme’s wider ambition to plant 14 hectares of seagrass around Scotland’s coasts between 2025 and 2028.