Restoring the reefs thatlock away carbon.

Since the Native Americans first settled along the coastline of the Northern Gulf of Mexico, oyster reefs have been revered as a vital source of both human nutrition and marine habitat. The ecological benefits have long been recognized as playing a major role in providing spatial habitat for a multitude of other marine organisms, enhancing water quality, and stabilizing shorelines around the world.

Oysters are considered ecosystem engineers because of their remarkable ability to build reefs. Unfortunately, oyster reefs have been identified as the most degraded estuarine habitats in the world; roughly 85% of oyster reef habitat has been lost globally over the past 130 years.

Historic losses are attributable to multiple drivers including the past practice of mining oyster shells for use as aggregate, alterations made to freshwater inflows, and other changes that affected the hydrodynamics of our bays and estuaries. In Louisiana, there was once an oyster reef running along the state’s central coastline estimated to have been approximately 100 miles long and 5 to 10 miles wide — researchers refer to this massive historic reef as the Great Barrier Reef of the Americas, and attribute its decimation to the shell mining operations of the 20th century.

Despite the overwhelming decline, the oyster fishing industry has developed innovative methods to reliably and efficiently recreate this vital habitat in the portions of the bays with suitable salinities, temperatures, and flow. Today, the industry creates and maintains hundreds of thousands of acres of oyster habitat within their leases.