New York: The Big Oyster

A long time ago, New York Harbor was full of oysters. There were so many that people called the city The Big Oyster. Most of them were Eastern oysters (Crassostrea virginica). These oysters helped clean the water, protect the shoreline, and support marine life. One oyster can filter about 50 gallons of water each day. Oyster reefs made the harbor healthier and stronger.

What is an Eastern Oyster?

The Eastern oyster is a shellfish that lives in salty or brackish water. It has a rough, gray shell and stays in one place, attached to rocks or other oysters. It eats by filtering tiny food from the water. Oysters grow in groups called reefs, which also create safe homes for fish, crabs, and other sea creatures.

Why We Should Care

Oysters are important, but they are in danger. Pollution, too much freshwater, and hard seawalls make it hard for oysters to grow. They need clean, salty water, soft places to settle, and plenty of oxygen. By helping oysters come back, we also help make the water cleaner, the shoreline stronger, and the harbor full of life again.

We identified suitable oyster habitats by combining environmental monitoring data with species presence records.

Environmental Data Collection: We gathered salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and pH data from monitoring stations, then applied Kriging interpolation to create continuous environmental layers.

Suitability Modeling: Oyster presence points were used to train a MaxEnt model, commonly used for species distribution modeling.

Visualization: The resulting raster was converted into a hexagonal grid, with each hexagon assigned a suitability score. This format supports intuitive web-based visualization.

The final map highlights areas favorable or unfavorable for oyster survival, based on environmental data and spatial inference.

Oyster Presence Points: Billion Oyster Project

Water Quality: NYC Open Data

Bathymetry: NOAA

Waterfront Condition: Collected manually by Josie and Yuki. Covers selected locations only. (Want to contribute? Submit your own waterfront photo.)

Where should oysters live? Oysterbnb uses real data to help you find the answer, understand what keeps oysters alive, and see why ecosystems need protecting.

Contact us to learn more or get involved.