An increasingly important part of my extension education and applied research program involves providing information and technical assistance to a range of user groups involved with the restoration of native Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida). To this end, my colleagues and I have developed a coast-wide network of participants as part of the “Native Olympia Oyster Collaborative (NOOC)”. The NOOC involves participants from British Columbia to Baja California and includes resource managers, First Nation and Indigenous tribal groups, restoration scientists and practitioners, and shellfish growers. We have conducted several workshops (all remotely since 2020) and have constructed a website that documents the extensive efforts by numerous groups in California and elsewhere along the Pacific coast (https://olympiaoysternet.ucdavis.edu/). This website includes story maps, project goals, and narratives discussing ongoing restoration and research activities, information about native oysters and restoration guidance, lesson plans and resources already successfully used in K-12 teaching and explains Olympia oyster aquaculture and their importance as food. We also produced a set of four-page leaflets that that provide information about Olympia oysters and restoration efforts in each of four west coast estuaries.
Working Across Multiple Sectors to Restore Native Olympia Oysters
Involving Community Scientists and Volunteers in Functional Eradication
My work has focused on developing a network of community scientists (=citizen scientists) in an ongoing program to manage the invasive non-native European green crab in central California lagoon (Seadrift Lagoon, Stinson Beach, CA). With initial support from the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and later from NSF, the long-term goal was initially to eradicate invasive European green crabs in Seadrift Lagoon, which had among the higher densities of this crab in California. During the course of this project, which began in 2009 and continues to the present, we used a network of volunteers from the surrounding community who were interested in habitat restoration and wanted to remove this non-native predator and allow native species to return to prior abundances. The focus of the project eventually shifted from full eradication to suppression of the green crab population and maintaining a sufficiently low enough to recover important ecosystem functions without risking the population rebound. To maintain these project goals, community scientists and volunteers now manage the project , which has successfully maintained low densities of green crabs for the past five years (Grosholz et al. 2021).