This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A new study shows that the world's oyster reefs are a precious resource that's vastly underestimated and underutilized. The authors set out to calculate the reefs' potential gross ecosystem product (GEP), the ecological counterpart of the gross economic product, and arrived at trillions of dollars in ecosystem goods and services delivered each year to different aspects of planetary health, including human well-being.
But for their full potential to be realized, oyster reefs around the world will need to be restored and protected. "Here we estimate that fully restored oyster reefs in the top 10 hotspot countries worldwide would yield a GEP of $12 trillion," said Dr. Matteo Convertino, an associate professor at Tsinghua University and the corresponding author of the publication in Frontiers in Marine Science.
The U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goal "Life below water" calls for the conservation and sustainable use of coastal and marine resources to safeguard human well-being. But today, oyster reefs—like all coastal ecosystems—are under growing pressure from overexploitation, pollution and climate change. Worldwide, an estimated 85% of such reefs have been lost over the past century, especially in estuaries and river deltas.
Convertino and colleagues began by assessing where suitable habitats for oyster reefs exist around the world today and where reefs could spontaneously form, given the right protection and restoration interventions. They then estimated the potential value of the entire "portfolio" of ecosystem services these reefs could deliver. Besides oysters for human consumption, these include water filtration, shoreline protection, the recycling of nutrients through the food web and carbon sequestration.
Oyster reefs also provide food, shelter and nursery grounds for a plethora of fish and invertebrates. The scientists imported thousands of geotagged records of oyster reefs from two public databases. They then used a tried-and-tested machine learning algorithm to predict geographic distributions and habitat suitability around the world and identify potential new locations for reefs.
Their estimate of suitability weighed a slew of environmental measures such as local water temperature, salinity, light, nutrient richness and oxygenation. Any location with a habitat suitability score of 65% or greater was classified as suitable. By combining a given area's score with a measure of the ecosystem services that a reef there could provide, the authors rated the "ecopotential" of each location.
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