Oyster Restoration For Chesapeake Nears Finish Line, Next Steps Uncertain

By Timothy B. Wheeler, Bay Journal, Maryland Matters

September 15, 2025

The oyster planting in Maryland’s Manokin River went off without a hitch — something that seemed a long shot just a few years ago. Time will tell how fruitful it proves to be.

Propelled by a fire hose of water, oyster shells shot out of the side of the rebuilt oyster buy boat Poppa Francis as it pirouetted over a reef in the lower Eastern Shore river. The mound of shells washed overboard sank out of sight, bearing with them millions of spat — speck-sized baby oysters spawned weeks ago at the Horn Point hatchery of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

That late July planting of about 14 million spat on shell marked one of the last needed to complete what participants proclaim is the largest oyster restoration project in the world.

More than 90% of those tiny hatchery-produced spat won’t make it to adulthood, victims of predators, disease and poor water quality. That’s a necessary tradeoff, explained Chris Judy, shellfish division manager of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

“It seems like a high number,” he said, “but you have to plant large amounts … in order to end up with a large population of oysters.”

The Manokin, off lower Tangier Sound in Somerset County, is the last of the five tributaries Maryland targeted for its share of the restoration effort and the biggest lift in either Maryland or Virginia. When the last batch of spat-on-shell is planted there in the next several weeks, 441 acres of oyster habitat will have been recouped in the river.

Maryland has wrapped up initial restoration work in four other tributaries: Harris Creek and the Tred Avon, Little Choptank and St. Mary’s rivers.

After planting oyster shell in the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach in the spring, Virginia completed work in the five tributaries it had targeted for large-scale restoration. The others, where work is finished, are the Lafayette, Piankatank, lower York and Great Wicomico rivers. Virginia even tacked on a sixth project to rebuild a 24-acre reef in the Elizabeth River.

In all, more than 1,800 acres of reefs have been restored in sanctuaries in Maryland and Virginia.

It will take at least a few years to tell if those baby oysters are thriving — and most likely some extra plantings to fill in thin spots on the reefs, as has occurred on the other projects. But the final planting marks the successful completion of the commitment made in the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement to restore oyster reefs in 10 Bay tributaries in the two states by 2025. Indeed, oyster restoration is for many the shining star among the mixture of outcomes in the agreement that have been achieved or fallen short.

A rough start

A decade ago, that success seemed far from assured. While Virginia’s restoration work proceeded more or less smoothly, Maryland’s projects got off to a bumpy start amid fierce resistance from watermen.

Maryland watermen have long resented the decision state officials made in 2010 to expand the network of oyster sanctuaries and bar commercial harvest in them. The large-scale restoration work occurred in some of those sanctuaries, and watermen complained that the projects were a waste of money and doomed to fail.

In late 2015, with the first restoration project under way in Harris Creek, watermen convinced the administration of Republican Gov. Larry Hogan to pause the work underway in the Tred Avon. They complained that the stone being used in some reef construction there — because the preferred oyster shells were in short supply — interfered with crabbing and fishing.

It didn’t help that some of the stone reefs created in Harris Creek were mistakenly built too high, so close to the water’s surface that some boats were damaged when they tried to pass over the uncharted navigational hazards. Although the errors were fixed, it took nearly a year before restoration work resumed in the Tred Avon.

Chris Judy of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources points to a barely visible baby oyster, or spat, attached to an oyster shell. (Photo by Dave Harp/Chesapeake Bay Journal)

In the meantime, federal money that had been reserved for the project was diverted to Virginia, leading to further delays that stretched that work out for another five years.

Smaller projects in the Little Choptank and St. Mary’s rivers went more smoothly, but the big Manokin undertaking sparked a political and legal fight in 2021 that held it up for more than a year. Watermen, still unhappy about the creation of an oyster sanctuary in the river years ago, opposed its selection for the restoration effort.

They got a receptive hearing from the Somerset County board of commissioners, which filed a lawsuit challenging the project. In November 2021, a Circuit Court judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the state Department of Natural Resources from proceeding.

An appeals court overruled the judge a few months later and stayed the restraining order. But it took another year before the judge actually lifted his injunction in February 2023 and a change of administration, which under Democratic Gov. Wes Moore finally approved the contract to proceed with the Manokin project.

Mammoth undertaking

Looking back, it is no surprise that the largest oyster restoration effort ever undertaken would involve some mammoth logistics and an eye-popping price tag of more than $100 million.

In Maryland, state and federal agencies planned to build 1,333 acres of reefs across five of its Chesapeake Bay tributaries. If put together, those reefs would cover roughly 2 square miles of bottom — equal to more than 1,000 football fields.

Final figures await the completion of the Manokin project, but through the end of 2024 some 7.19 billion hatchery-spawned oysters had been planted in the five tributaries. Maryland needed to rely on the UMCES hatchery to crank out billions of spat because lower salinities made natural oyster reproduction iffy there. The total cost, as a result, had reached approximately $92.82 million by the end of 2024.

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Virginia’s acreage target was slightly smaller: 1,059 acres, with another 24 acres tacked on for the Elizabeth River, which the state designated as a sixth “bonus” tributary. But the effort was less complicated and much less costly because higher salinities in the lower Bay ensured good natural oyster reproduction on the newly built reefs there. The total cost in Virginia was nearly $22 million.

All told, the 10-tributary effort has encompassed about 2,300 acres of reefs, though 500 acres of that was found to be healthy already and without need of restoration. The healthy reefs cover a combined 3.5 square miles of bottom, enough to hold 1,700 football fields.

Success … so far

For all that money and spat, follow-up monitoring of the reefs has found encouraging results so far.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 98% of the reefs checked in Maryland between 2015 and 2023 met the minimum population density planners had set to judge the effort’s success. Moreover, 83% of the reefs had even higher densities of more than 50 oysters per square meter.

“We are seeing success metrics met,” said DNR’s Judy.

In Virginia, the follow-ups have found even more to like — 425 adult oysters and spat per square meter, for instance, on reefs in the Piankatank River on the Middle Peninsula and an astounding 3,400 per square meter on the restored reefs in Virginia Beach’s Lynnhaven River.

Maryland watermen still look askance at the projects. They point out that although computer modeling indicates the free-floating larvae produced by oysters planted on the restored reefs should spread beyond the sanctuaries to populate other reefs, there’s no concrete evidence of that happening. Scientists say they lack the ability so far to track oyster spat back to their source.

Even if it’s not clear how or if they’re helping repopulate the rest of the Bay, the large restoration projects were conceived mainly to provide “ecosystem benefits.” As filter feeders, oysters remove some of the nutrients and sediment polluting the water. And the reefs they build, oyster by oyster, provide habitat and food for fish, crabs and a variety of other marine creatures. Their reefs can also help buffer shorelines from waves that aggravate erosion.

Shells carrying oyster spat from the University of Maryland Horn Point oyster nursery are shot into Maryland’s Manokin River in July. An estimated 14 million spat were planted in the river on this day. (Photo by Dave Harp/Chesapeake Bay Journal)

Julie Luecke, coastal resource scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, argues it was money well spent. She cited a NOAA report assessing the economic benefits of a $20 million restoration of 400 acres of reef in North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound. It concluded that every $1 spent yielded $1.70 in return, supporting jobs and businesses hired to help with the project.

Spinoffs

During the long slog to complete work in the 10 tributaries, oyster restoration efforts have expanded to other water bodies, and they’ve drawn participation from municipalities, environmental nonprofits, watershed groups and oyster farmers.

In fall 2024, Maryland’s DNR announced it would expand its reef restoration sanctuaries in the Nanticoke River and Hooper Strait on the Eastern Shore and Herring Bay on the Western Shore. The acreage has yet to be settled on, but officials say they expect them to be roughly on par with the large projects in Harris Creek, the Little Choptank and Manokin rivers. Watershed groups are taking on projects in the Severn River and Breton Bay as well.

Under the direction of Maryland lawmakers, DNR also is planting oysters in Eastern Bay, spending $1 million a year to plant spat in sanctuaries there and devoting an equal amount to replenishing reefs in waters open to commercial harvest.

In Virginia, the Bay Foundation’s Luecke said, the Hampton River has received restoration attention, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is planning work in Tangier Sound. Watershed groups are aiming to work in the Rappahannock River.

An uncertain future

Buoyed by the successful reef restoration in the 10 tributaries, the Chesapeake Bay Program — the state-federal partnership that leads the Bay cleanup effort — wants to keep going. But there are questions about whether it can keep up the pace.

The draft revision of the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement proposes to “restore or conserve at least 1,800 additional acres of oyster reef habitat.”

Environmentalists would like the Bay Program to increase the goal back to 2,400 acres in the new agreement. They also want the agreement to set a deadline for completing the next round of large restoration projects. The draft put out for public comment this summer has none.

Chris Judy, shellfish division manager for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, holds oyster shells containing speck-sized spat. (Photo by Dave Harp/Chesapeake Bay Journal)

Still, there are hurdles.

“There has been a lot of apprehension,” the Bay Foundation’s Luecke said, as federal funding has been cut or held up for a number of environmental programs and projects. The Army Corps of Engineers, a major funder of oyster restoration in the Bay, is a big question mark now. Although the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee recently urged the Corps to devote some of its budget to Bay oyster projects, there is no amount specified in the funding bill.

“It’s hard not to have the mentality of, ‘Where are we going to get the money to do this work?’” Luecke said.

As for a deadline, those in the Bay Program working on fisheries issues have mentioned 2040. The Bay Foundation is urging 2035.

Given all the government, nonprofit and volunteer efforts that have come together over the years for oyster restoration, Luecke said it would be a shame to take the foot off the gas now.

“We have the partnerships, we have the momentum, and we have the lessons learned,” she said.

There are still plenty of areas to work on, Luecke contended. An analysis by the Bay Foundation identified 24,000 acres over several bodies of water where salinity and bottom conditions are suitable for restoring oyster habitat.

Bringing oysters back is no panacea for all the Bay’s ills, she argued, but given their multiple environmental and economic benefits, they’re an essential part of the solution.

“You’ve got to save oysters to save the Bay,” Luecke said.