Bird’s Eye View

Reserves Advance Oyster Reef Drone Monitoring in the Southeast

Oyster reefs are habitat super stars. They filter water, support coastal ecosystems, stabilize shorelines, and help remove excess nutrient pollution. Oysters are also important to U.S. coastal economies. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wild-harvest landings and farmed oysters had a combined value of $341 million in 2023.

As oyster populations have declined across the Southeastern United States, coastal resource managers there face a fundamental challenge: how can we better understand where reefs are, how they are changing, and whether restoration efforts are working? 

A collaborative project involving the ACE Basin, Guana Tolomato Matanzas, North Carolina, North Inlet-Winyah Bay, and Sapelo Island Reserves, graduate students, and NOAA NCCOS explored how drones could play a role in helping to answer those questions. The effort builds on an earlier Reserve System initiative that tested the use of drones to monitor tidal marshes.

“Oyster monitoring was a pretty natural next step,” says Justin Ridge, the research coordinator at the North Carolina Reserve who has been heavily involved in that project. “Several of us who were part of the marsh work also have a background in oysters.”

Traditional oyster monitoring can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and limited in the area it can cover. Some methods can also disturb or damage the very reefs managers are trying to protect. Drone imagery, by contrast, can capture entire reefs at high resolution, making it easier to track changes over time while minimizing disturbance.

To begin, the team focused on a practical question: Can drone data provide information that managers can actually use? To address that, they developed standardized ways to measure reef characteristics including size, shape, location, complexity, footprint, change, and density and applied these in their analysis of the data.

The answer was a resounding yes. The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources is now using these workflows to monitor recreational and commercial oyster harvesting grounds and restoration projects. Researchers and agencies in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida are applying the methods to restoration, shoreline protection, and sentinel-site monitoring as well. 

“Not only are our project takeaways attracting interest and use beyond our partners on this project,” says Ridge, “they are also transferable to different areas of the country and world. Anybody can build on what we are learning here.”

“Developing complex technical workflows is time-consuming. Collaboratively developing them was more efficient than developing them on our own,” says Gary Sundin, wildlife biologist at the Marine Resources Research Institute. “The workflows the collaborative team developed provided us with a good toolbox of options to directly apply or adapt to our specific needs.”

Now the project team is focusing on integrating these tools directly into management. One key goal is establishing places to monitor where repeated drone surveys can reveal changes caused by storms, mortality events, harvesting, or other pressures. Rather than attempting to map every oyster reef along the coast, managers can strategically monitor these representative sites and use those observations to inform decisions at a larger scale.

By combining long-term research with emerging technologies across state borders, Reserves and their partners are helping managers make better-informed decisions about how to protect, restore, and sustain these critical, and economically vital, coastal habitats.

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The ACE Basin Reserve is managed daily by the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), protecting nearly 100,000 acres of coastal habitats.