To achieve this the federal and state governments and, surprisingly, the military, have provided extensive funding. Large-scale oyster restoration was triggered by Presidential Executive Order in 2009 and the Chesapeake Bay Agreement signed by the governors of the bay’s watershed states in 2014 with the common goal to restore oyster populations in 10 tributaries by 2025. Oyster restoration in Chesapeake is focused on six tributaries three in the upper bay in Maryland and three in the lower part in the state of Virginia. The Chesapeake Bay Programme is based on a strong partnership that involves federal and state government agencies, the US military, academic institutions from both Maryland and Virginia, NGOs and scientists. We were then given a guided tour of the Horn Point Laboratory and oyster hatchery by Stephanie Alexander, the overall manager of the facility. It was a day of two Stephanies – in the morning we met Stephanie Westby, the manager of NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay Programme who gave us an overview of the restoration work across the whole of the bay system.
We spent the first night in Cambridge, Maryland, near to our destination next day, the Horn Point Laboratory, part of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science which contains the world’s largest oyster hatchery for Crassostrea virginica, the native oyster on the east coast of the United States. All were there thanks to Boze Hancock of The Nature Conservancy’s Global Oceans programme, ecosystem restoration ‘guru’ and expert oyster tour organiser. The rest of the team consisted of Karel van den Wijngaard of ARK Nature from the Netherlands and two staff members from The Nature Conservancy (TNC): Anita Nedosyko, an oyster restoration manager from South Australia and Mike McCann, an urban ecologist based in New York City who is working with the Billion Oyster Project there. Also from the UK were our Solent project partners Dr Joanna Preston and Luke Helmer from the University of Portsmouth, with Dr Alison Debney of the Zoological Society of London representing the Essex Native Oyster Restoration Initiative, on which BLUE is also represented. A small team of budding oyster restoration practitioners from Europe, the United States and Australia arrived in Washington DC in early June to start an intensive week-long oyster study tour of both Chesapeake Bay on the east coast and Puget Sound on the west.įrom the Blue Marine Foundation were Tim Glover and Simon Harding who have been leading the Solent Oyster Restoration Project since 2015. Oyster restoration in the United States is decades ahead of Europe and much better funded, with significant funds coming from the government including the military, a BLUE fact-finding trip to the east and west coasts has shown.