Speaker
Description
Oyster populations in Chesapeake Bay in the eastern United States have dropped to a few percent of historic levels. Restoration requires building artificial reefs as substrate for oysters to grow on. I will present a metapopulation model for oyster reefs that are coupled by transport of larvae. The model consists of ordinary differential equations for juveniles, adults, dead shell/reef substrate, and sediment at each location. I will first discuss results for up to two reefs. There is a tradeoff between spending more money to start constructed reefs with better initial conditions versus spending more time by restoring different sites in stages over multiple years. Next, I will discuss heuristics for selecting the best locations from a larger set when resources permit restoration of only some of the sites. I will use a realistic connectivity matrix between sites based on water flow and will consider both the total population and the resilience to disturbances. Finally, I will add harvest to the model and consider which reefs should be protected or harvested.
