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Dr. Philine zu Ermgassen is a Junior Research Fellow Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge where she researches the many benefits humans derive from coastal ecosystems. She has worked with The Nature Conservancy over many years to quantify the loss of oyster habitats and their associated services, including the benefits to water quality that oysters provide by filtering the water and the enhancement of commercially important fish they provide through providing a place of refuge to young fish and crabs. This work is being used to make the ecological and business case for oyster restoration globally.

Richard Haward is a seventh generation oysterman. The Haward family have been cultivating oysters since the 1700s so seawater runs through their veins.

Richard has been working on the water for most of his life. Giving up a place at university he took on the family tradition of oyster fishing full-time when he was eighteen after his father died prematurely.

Peter Marren is a writer, one-time journalist and all-round naturalist. From 1977 to 1992 he worked for the Nature Conservancy Council in Scotland and England, latterly as its inhouse ‘author-editor’. Since then he has written about twenty books on British natural history, books, bibliography and military history. The Wild Woods, England’s National Nature Reserves and Britain’s Rare Flowers were all runner’s-up for the Natural World Book Prize. The New Naturalists won the silver medal of the Society of the History of Natural History and Britain’s Rare Flowers the BSBI Presidents’ Prize. He was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to research Bugs Britannica. He is the author of the New Naturalist conservation volume, simply titled Nature Conservation. His latest book, Rainbow Dust, about butterflies, is to be published next spring.

He also writes obituaries for the Independent, conservation news for Whitaker’s Almanack, formerly has a column in The Countryman and is regular contributor to British Wildlife, which includes his famous column of biting wit, Twitcher in the Swamp.

He lives next to a swamp meadow in Wiltshire.