Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Headquarters
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Managing fisheries species of conservation, production and habitat value remains challenging. Increasing reliance on numerical simulation models to help inform management and restoration choices benefits from careful consideration of critical early steps in model development. These early steps include identification of priority management questions, consideration of the key physiological responses and vital rates and primary driving variables, acknowledgment of uncertainty, and focused investment in basic research to reduce uncertainty. Along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, the eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica, fulfills important ecological and economic roles. Using the eastern oyster as an example, we draw on several recent frameworks outlining best practices for model development and application for fisheries restoration, conservation and management to identify priority model questions, outline a conceptual ecological model (CEM) to guide numerical model development and use this framework to identify uncertainties and research needs. The CEM uses a nested design identifying explicit vital rates, processes, attributes and outcomes at the level of the individual oyster, the reef (population) and at a metapopulation level (a network of reef populations) in response to drivers and changing environmental factors. Most management actions related to reef restoration and harvest impact reef (population) attributes, but drivers (i.e., climate change, coastal and water resource engineering) impact environmental factors that alter vital rates and attributes of individual oysters, populations and metapopulations. Investment in studies targeting individual oyster and population (reef) level multi-stressor responses (filtration, respiration, growth, reproduction), and improving hydrodynamic and environmental models targeting drivers influencing metapopulation vital rates and attributes (i.e., connectivity, substrate persistence) would contribute to reducing critical uncertainties. Development of numerical models covering the entire oyster life cycle and connectivity of populations (reefs) using hydrodynamic models of current and predicted conditions to provide key abiotic and biotic factors influencing larval movement, recruitment, and on-reef oyster vital rates, would assist in balancing goals of conservation and production management of this foundational estuarine species.