Hello! We have been encouraged to reflect on the implications of our projects in the communities we work with, and in our fields. This project has two major goals, assessing the current condition of intertidal oyster reefs within Franklin County Florida and determining whether properties of reef sediment can be used to assess the “condition” of an oyster reef. The oyster fishery in the region once produced 90% of Florida’s oysters and created an industry that supported communities such as Carabelle, Eastpoint, and Apalachicola. After the fishery began to collapse in 2012, more research was conducted to assess the current condition of the reefs in the region and identify factors that contributed to the collapse.
Over ten years later, monitoring and restoration projects have been carried out in the region, focusing on the subtidal reefs that once sustained the fishery. Fewer projects have been focused on assessing intertidal reefs. As broadcast spawners, oysters reproduce by releasing their gametes into the water column, where they are carried by the current before settling on a substrate, such as another oyster. Because the larvae are spread throughout the region, across both intertidal and subtidal reefs, the success of intertidal reefs may be an important factor in restoring subtidal populations.
There has been an intertidal mapping project in the region, along with a monthly monitoring program carried out by the Apalachicola Bay Systems Initiative. These projects provided invaluable data on the changes in intertidal reef condition over time. The project I am currently working on is taking a different approach, evaluating changes in intertidal reef condition over space. Furthermore, we are focused on combining data on oyster abundance and structure at the surface with data on the chemical and physical composition of the reef itself. A study conducted on the east coast of Florida in Mosquito lagoon found that as intertidal reefs were restored, they changed in chemical composition and density relative to dead reefs. We are trying to see if these findings apply in other regions, such as Franklin County.
Within the region, we focused on five major intertidal reef complexes in a different area of the county, with three at the eastern, western, and southern ends of the bay and two outside of it. Each complex experiences different environmental conditions, such as variations in salinity, water residence time, and proximity to land. The work funded by the IDEA Grant program will allow us to understand another environmental factor, the origin of the organic material the oysters are consuming. A study conducted over two decades ago in the region used similar methods to compare the effects of spatial distribution on isotopic composition in a variety of species, including oysters. Comparing these results with our own may allow us to which primary producers in the area are supporting oyster populations, and whether this has significantly changed before and after the collapse.
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