Shoring up New York Harbor's reef, a billion oysters at a time

An instructor at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, watches students as they send 422 oyster reef structures into the Hudson River. Credit Agata Poniatowski/NPR.

An instructor at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School watches students as they send 422 oyster reef structures into the Hudson River.

Andrea Strong, a food writer, covers oysters and citizen science in The Salt section of NPR today:

Across New York City, more than 70 restaurants are tossing their oyster shells not into the trash or composting pile, but into the city's eroded harbor. It's all part of Billion Oyster Project's restaurant shell-collection program [at] the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a public high school on Governors Island that offers technical and vocational training in the marine sciences. The New York Governor's Office of Storm Recovery has partnered with Billion Oyster Project to install oysters on its $74 million Living Breakwaters Project, which aims to reduce and reverse erosion and damage from storm waves, improve the ecosystem health of Raritan Bay and encourage environmentally conscious stewardship of nearshore waters.

Read on to find out more about an excellent example of collaboration among commercial, educational, and government interests to build a sustainable and very useful result that also helps New York City weather future sea level rise. We need these kinds of ideas in our own San Francisco Bay Area as well.