COMMUNITY LEVEL EFFECTS MONITORING ON STOCK RESTORATION ENHANCEMENTS FOR Ostrea lurida ON A STRUCTURE LIMITED BEACH IN PUGET SOUND, WASHINGTON.
Jonathan P. Davis, Jordan Watson, Brian L. Allen*, Annemarie K. Ansley
Puget Sound Restoration Fund 590 Madison Ave North Bainbridge Island, WA 98110 brian@restorationfund.org
A prime rationale for native oyster enhancement efforts Washington State is the development of habitat types that may then be of benefit to native fishes, including salmonids and mobile invertebrates including decapod crustaceans. Habitat that increases overall complex structure likely increases the overall quantity and variety of microstructure. Enhanced habitat microstructure may be described as an increase in hard substrate area available for settlement, increased availability of edge or crevice habitat, increased variability in habitat with sediment accretional or depositional characteristics that are dependent on boundary layer flow characteristics that themselves vary on spatial and temporal scales, or other features that serve to increase the variety and amount of habitat suitable for small, epibenthic and infaunal animals to utilize for shelter or foraging.
We specified a number of monitoring objectives in 2009 for previous oyster habitat enhancements that includes an evaluation of benthic conditions both before and following our manipulations of benthic oyster settlement structure. Shell enhancements were conducted over four consecutive years on an unstructured mudflat in Liberty Bay, Puget Sound.
The monitoring results and analysis presented here comes from the ongoing monitoring of temperature, larval retention, epibenthic meiofauna, benthic infauna, fish, macro invertebrates and settlement by
Ostrea lurida
.
The
condition
of the emergent shell is another important aspect of the enhancement, monitored to assess the application of this practice for stock recovery and to observe the communtiy effect of shell enhancement.
