Shellfish Restoration
Restoring Local Oyster Reef Habitats
The Oyster Restoration Initiative, started by José Núñez, was created to engage citizen scientists, advance our understanding of oyster ecology, and restore local oyster reef habitats in our coastal ecosystem.
The Osborne lab volunteers and staff created 260 environmentally friendly Community Oyster Reef Enhancement (CORE) Modules to restore habitats, prevent shoreline erosion, and promote biological diversity. In April 2019, these modules were deployed in the Nassau River to create new oyster reefs as part of the Goffinsville Park Living Shoreline Demonstration site, in partnership with Justina Dacey, UF/IFAS/Extension agent for Nassau County.
In 2019 a workshop was held for new oyster gardeners, with over 47 oyster gardeners in Northeast Florida participating. Gardeners grew oysters in the waterways by their homes and collected important environmental data like water temperature, salinity, and water clarity. These reefs are still thriving and looking great!
Blue Ocean Quest Partnership
Whitney Lab is embarking on a project with Blue Ocean Quest Inc. to determine efficiency of unmanned aircraft deployment of clams. We are doing this project because we have two different strategies for restoring clams in the IRL. The first strategy is a high-energy intensive one where we out plant adult clams and cover them with nets for the duration of the project. The other theoretical application might be that out planting at a smaller size in mass could over come predation pressure, and we would could do so evenly across large areas on drone platform, as you can see in the videos. These drones have the capability of deploying 3,000,000, 2mm clams and can broadcast them easily across an acre in roughly 10-12 minutes, more to come on this amazing project to further the advancement of water quality in the IRL!