Abstract
Marine ecosystems of temperate regions are highly modified by human activity and far from their original natural status. The North Sea, known as an intensively used area, has lost its offshore oyster grounds due to overexploitation in a relatively short time. Native oyster beds as a once abundant and ecologically highly important biogenic reef-type have vanished from the North Sea ecosystem in most areas of both their former distribution and magnitude. Worldwide, oyster stocks have been severely exploited over the past centuries. According to estimates, about 85% of the worldwide oyster reef habitats have been destroyed over the course of the last century. This loss of oyster populations has meant far more than just the loss of a valuable food resource. Oyster reefs represent a characteristic benthic community which offers a variety of valuable ecosystem services: better water quality, local decrease of toxic algal blooms, increase in nutrient uptake, increase of bentho-pelagic coupling, increase in species richness, increase of multidimensional biogenic structures which provide habitat, food, and protection for numerous invertebrate and fish species. The aim of oyster restoration is to promote redevelopment of this valuable missing habitat. The development of strategies, methods, and procedures for a sustainable restoration of the European oyster Ostrea edulis in the German North Sea is currently a focus of marine nature conservation. Main drivers for restoring this ecological key species are the enhancement of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the marine environment. Results of these investigations will support the future development and implementation of a large-scale and long-term German native oyster restoration programme to re-establish a healthy population of this once-abundant species now absent from the region.
Highlights
Marine ecosystems of temperate regions are highly modified by human activity and far from their original natural status
There is clear evidence that the German North Sea encountered the loss of oyster reefs from its coastal ecosystems, and the loss of an ecological baseline through the eradication of oyster reefs from coastal ecosystems and human memory (Alleway and Connell 2015)
In 2017, ten European nations agreed to establish an active network for knowledge and technology transfer: the Native Oyster Restoration Alliance (NORA) will increase success of marine nature conservation by facilitating oyster reef restoration and protection
Summary
Oysters are important ecosystem engineers as they build up ecologically relevant hard structures by forming reef habitats. The tendency for younger generations to lose the past as a benchmark for interpreting the present is called “environmental generational amnesia” e.g., (Kahn and Friedman 1995; Kahn 2002; Papworth et al 2009) It is based on the concept of shifting baselines (Pauly 1995) and, for the German. Even coastal communities in Germany no longer remember formerexistence, existence,vast vastdistribution, distribution, and environmental ecological relevance of the species. This contemporary state can be considered as an environmental generational amnesia and, in consequence, as the failure of adequate calibration of conservation and restoration goals. Marine environment, weeventually lose or eventually lostwhich species do not ecosystems These may not be spectacular and might not beagenda on the agenda of the general see.
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