Estimating Finfish Production Supported By Chesapeake Bay Oyster Reefs: An Ecosystem Modeling Approach

Overfishing, disease, and pollution have led to a decline in the Chesapeake Bay eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) population. Recent stock assessments indicate that the stock is at less than 1% of historical abundance. The loss of this oyster stock and the oyster reef structure has resulted in damaging consequences to the ecosystem services that oysters provide, including the coupling of benthic and pelagic food webs, provision of refugia from predation and for nesting, and feeding habitat for mobile and sessile organisms. Understanding how restored reefs support fish biomass is a step toward quantifying the economic benefit of oyster restoration. By applying model-based estimates of finfish biomass supported by oyster reefs, we calculated results for the per-unit-area enhancement of production of fishes from the addition of restored oyster reef habitat. Oyster restoration in the Bay is moving to a targeted, tributary-scale approach to restoration with defined restoration targets in each tributary. The assumption is that reaching these restoration targets for oysters will yield ecosystem benefits to the tributary at large. Our modeling approach helps estimate the level of ecosystem services we can expect to see as a result of reaching the restoration targets.