District scientist published in Science

Posted July 31, 2009
By Norfolk District Public Affairs

An article in the July 30 edition of Science Express, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, highlights the scientific successes of a Corps-designed native oyster restoration project.

Co-authored by Dave Schulte, a Norfolk District oceanographer and student at the College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, explains how the Corps and its project partners developed a thriving oyster population in Virginia’s Great Wicomico River.

Schulte teamed with fellow student Russ Burke, and professor Rom Lipcius to write "Unprecedented Restoration of a Native Oyster Metapopulation."

In the paper, the authors discuss how the 5-year restoration project achieved an estimated oyster population of 184.5 million oysters on 86.5 acres of sanctuary reefs – a population believed to be 57-times larger than the pre-restoration population and which far exceeds the Chesapeake Bay Program’s restoration goal of a 10-fold increase of the 1994 baseline by 2010.

Currently posted on the Science Express Web site at http://www.sciencemag.org/, the article will also appear in the printed Science journal later in the year. According to the AAAS, Science is one of the world’s most prestigious, peer-reviewed science journals. The journal reaches a subscriber audience of about 130,000 people and a secondary audience of more than one million people.