AEL Partners with Presidio Trust on Native Oyster Habitat Restoration

AEL directors Evan Jones and Margaret Ikeda have been working for the past year with the Presidio Trust and the National Park Service on innovative ecological substrates for native oyster habitat restoration at the newly expanded wetlands at Quartermaster Reach / Crissy Marsh. The team includes research fellow and CCA M.Arch alum Sean Cunningham, the Benthic Lab at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, Kreysler & Associates, and support from Autodesk’s Technology Center, San Francisco.

This past year, the team has deployed a series of floating substrate prototypes to test ways to recruit Olympia oyster larvae and encourage their growth in the marsh. This work has informed the design of larger scale, custom-contoured composite panels, which will be installed later this summer as a permanent liners for new culverts that run beneath Mason Street.

For more information on the project, see this news post from the Presidio’s blog.