Tributary-Scale Oyster Habitat Restoration

Overfishing, disease, and pollution have left the Chesapeake Bay with less than one percent of the oysters it once had. Restoring oysters and the habitat they provide for a multitude of other fish and animals is essential to improving the health of the Bay. In response to the Chesapeake Bay Executive Order, NOAA and its partners are working to restore 20 Bay tributaries by 2025 with healthy oysters and viable habitat starting with Harris Creek. We will use habitat mapping and assessment tools to locate and quantify “restorable bottom” for oyster restoration to select tributaries with a strong likelihood of oyster restoration success. This approach will also apply the first-ever set of oyster restoration success metrics to evaluate progress.  While oyster restoration efforts have been under way in the Chesapeake Bay for more than two decades, varying assessment protocols and success criteria have made it difficult to determine how much progress has been made. For example, some locations have tracked progress in terms of acres restored; others in how many dollars have been spent. To clearly see how oyster restoration efforts are working, agencies involved in oyster restoration needed to move beyond this “comparing apples to oranges” approach especially as restoration efforts ramp up to large-scale, tributary-based projects.  The solution is a newly agreed-on set of science-based metrics that define a “successfully restored tributary” and a “successfully restored reef.”  These metrics are serving as a tool to plan and to evaluate oyster restoration consistently across the Chesapeake Bay and the framework used to develop them may have broader application to other restoration activities.