Oysters provide numerous ecosystem services. From habitat creation to water filtration and energy dissipation, they are natural infrastructure. Not to mention they’re pretty darn tasty and a valuable economic resource.
Coastal Louisiana is a major oyster producer, but populations are declining. There is a need for a decision-making tool that can account for system-wide oyster population dynamics to effectively inform restoration efforts.
Dynamic Solutions, LLC is co-leading a multi-agency public private partnership with the USGS Fisheries Co-Op Unit and Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to do just that. The interdisciplinary team is implementing a fully coupled oyster metapopulation modeling framework. It simulates the oyster full life cycle over multiple years at the scale of individual oyster larvae and reefs to entire estuaries, which is important to account for connectivity among reefs that impacts estuary-wide oyster dynamics.
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