Blue marine Foundation – Simon Harding

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. 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.

From the Blue Marine Foundation were Tim Glover and Simon Harding who have been leading the Solent Oyster Restoration Project since 2015. 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. 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. All were there thanks to Boze Hancock of The Nature Conservancy’s Global Oceans programme, ecosystem restoration ‘guru’ and expert oyster tour organiser. Click here to read more