High schoolers and climate activists are releasing 50,000 1-year-old oysters into a section of Jamaica Bay on Wednesday.
It’s the culmination of a yearslong effort to restore the area’s once-thriving oyster population.
“They filter the water, they stabilize the bottom, they protect the shore from waves – they have all these beneficial ecosystem services,” said Billion Oyster Project’s Executive Director Pete Malinowski. “And without the oyster reefs, New York Harbor is missing that dominant habitat type, the primary ecosystem that used to exist under the water.”
Under former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, the city announced plans to revamp Jamaica Bay’s once oyster-rich waters in 2016. A $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior – and additional funding from the local Department of Environmental Conservation – are being used to bankroll the project, which will help improve water quality and set the stage for more oysters to grow in the future.
It’ll also mark a major step in the goal of adding 2 million oysters – and a self-sustaining population – to Jamaica Bay.
Representatives from the state DEC, as well as the Billion Oyster Project, will enlist the help of students from the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School on Governors Island.
“At the Billion Oyster Project, we believe that environmental restoration – without education – is temporary,” Malinowski said. “If we want to improve long-term outcomes for the natural world – and for public school students – the best way to do that is to train students to preserve the environment.”
The oysters will be released at Bayswater Point State Park in Far Rockaway at 11 a.m.
Since 2014, an estimated 122 million oysters, and an additional 19 acres of three-dimensional oyster reef habitat, have been restored to New York Harbor, according to the most recent annual report from the Billion Oyster Project.