Professor Mark Johnson:

That is an extremely difficult question to answer. With regard to physically surveying the coastline, it would depend which species one would be examining. Some species are sub-tidal and perhaps they could be surveyed with the use of sonar systems or by divers, the use of both of which would considerably ramp up the time and investment involved. Any estimate would involve a deal of modelling involving the light quality, where the seaweed is coming to the end, and then matching that with a small number of test sites. It would bring us into the realm of the more one invests, perhaps the greater coverage and the more variance one would be confident is being explained, but it would involve a large amount of money. I would not like to put a figure on it until a scoping had been done of exactly how much detail we thought we would want to examine.