WeAreAquaculture’s Post

🦪 #Europe's #oyster reefs once covered 1.7 million hectares, stretching from the #NorthSea to the #Mediterranean, according to new #research published in the #scientific journal #NatureSustainability. 💬🌊 "Oysters still exist in these waters but they’re scattered, and the reefs they built are gone. We tend to think of our #seafloor as a flat, muddy expanse, but in the past many locations were a three-dimensional landscape of complex living #reefs – now completely lost from our collective memory," said lead researcher Ruth H Thurstan. 💡 Led by the University of Exeter and The University of Edinburgh, and involving over 30 European researchers from the #NativeOyster Restoration Alliance (#NORA), the research draws on data from an array of scientific and historical sources, providing the first quantitative description of Europe’s formerly vast #oysterreefs - crucial #baseline data for #ocean #restoration action. 💬 "Our findings demonstrate that restoring even a fraction of these past #habitats requires both ambitious #policy agreements and a step-change in our understanding of the long-term nature of human-induced #ecosystem degradation and the scales of historical loss in #marineecosystems," the researchers state in the published article. ✨ Read more on this story here 👉 https://lnkd.in/d23VWThX

  • No alternative text description for this image

To view or add a comment, sign in

Explore topics