Oyster Cam

Welcome to Oyster Cam

Help scientists and communities monitor the success of oyster restoration efforts

The Oyster Cam project connects scientists with communities interested in monitoring oyster reef restorations, giving volunteers the tools to see what's going on beneath the water's surface. 

The Oyster Cam methodology is simple: attach cameras to a PVC frame and toss it in the water. The footage captured gives us a snapshot of the oyster reef that we can use to understand how well oyster restoration is working at that site. Four river stewardship organizations around the Chesapeake Bay have already started testing this method out and the data we are getting back is awesome! 

Once we have the footage, screenshots are taken from the videos and uploaded to an interactive online platform called Zooniverse. On Zooniverse, students and volunteers are able to analyze images from each site so we can determine restoration success. 

Ultimately, scientists will use this data to assess reef health in order to report back to communities about the status of their restored reefs. 

Want to help us analyze the images of the oyster restoration sites? Stay tuned! We’re in the pilot phase and hope to launch in 2025.

Oyster Cam is made possible by funding from the Chesapeake Bay Trust, Smithsonian Life on a Sustainable Planet, and donations from people like you! 

The "What" and "Why"

Why Study Oyster Reefs? 

Oysters play an incredibly important role in coastal ecosystems. They create hard three-dimensional structures with their shells as they grow, providing habitat for other organisms, such fish and crabs. They also filter the water through their feeding activity, clearing the water of sediment and algae. Clearer water is important for other organisms living in coastal waters, especially underwater plants.

In addition to their importance to coastal ecosystems, oysters are also important part of coastal economies. Oysters are delicious (depending on who you ask, of course!) and have been an important part of human's diet for millennia. In the Chesapeake Bay region in particular, the oyster industry has been an important part of the culture of coastal communities.

Unfortunately, across the globe oysters are not as abundant as they once were. Overfishing, introductions of diseases, and decreases in water quality have all led to declines in oyster population. Fortunately, oyster restoration, which involves restoring oyster substrate or 'planting' juvenile or adult oysters on reefs, is being undertaken around the world to increase oyster populations.

An important part of oyster restoration efforts is monitoring to find out if the restoration was successful. Monitoring reefs includes examining the structure of the reef to see whether it's providing a good habitat for other animals. It can also mean looking to see the diversity of animals that are calling the reef home. 

What Are We Trying to Learn?

Monitoring is a key part of restoration as it lets us know whether the oyster restoration is working. Typically, monitoring requires lots of time, money, and specialized skills like scuba diving. 

Determined to find a better, more accessible monitoring solution, scientists in the Fisheries Conservation Lab came up with the ingenius idea of Oyster Cam. The Oyster Cam method involves placing GoPro cameras attached to a camera rig onto an oyster reef and taking pictures of the surrounding reef.

The images allow us to determine two important things about the oyster reefs: 1) how much of the bottom is covered by oysters and 2) the amount of vertical structure on the oyster reef. These two pieces of information help us determine if the reef restoration was successful (lots of coverage and tall structure if good, little coverage and short structure is less good). 
 

  • An underwater image of an unrestored oyster reef with a muddy seafloor and no oysters.

    Unrestored oyster reef in Maryland

  • An underwater image of an oyster reef with an abundance of oysters and bryozoans covering the seafloor.

    Restored oyster reef in Harris Creek, Maryland

Methods

The Oyster Cam method has four main steps: 

  1. Volunteers deploy the Go-Pro rig on restored oyster reefs and control oyster reefs. Since April 2023, we have worked with four local river stewardship organizations to test the rigs—we provide the training on how to deploy the rigs and volunteers monitor restored reefs in their local tributaries around the Chesapeake Bay. 
  2. SERC scientists pull the clearest images from the videos and upload them into Zooniverse, an online interactive platform used for research around the world. 
  3. (Coming soon!) Anyone with access to a computer and the internet analyzes the images by answering three questions to determine oyster percentage coverage and height. Each image is looked at by multiple people, and their collective answer is used to find a consensus score. Right now, high school students are testing out this workflow to help us determine if it works or not. 
  4. SERC scientists use the percentage coverage and height to give each image a score from 0 (barren seafloor) to 3 (healthy reef), and inform the organizations who monitored their reefs the status of the restoration.
  • A woman holding a PVC frame with GoPros attached over the edge of a small boat floating in the water.

    Camera rig used to capture images of oyster reefs

Get Involved

Right now we are not accepting new individual volunteers.

Oyster Cam is still in the pilot phase. We are figuring out how best to analyze the images in Zooniverse and get that information back to the Chesapeake Bay volunteers who are monitoring the restored reefs. 

Thanks to funding from Smithsonian Our Shared Future: Life on a Sustainable Planet, we just started the process of testing out the GoPro rig in other parts of the United States to see if it works in other habitats and with other oyster species. 

Want to help us analyze the images of the oyster restoration sites? Stay tuned! We’re in the pilot phase and hope to launch in 2025.