Current level of oyster farming unlikely to have substantial impact on Drakes Estero ecosystem

WASHINGTON -- A new report from the National Research Council finds a lack of strong scientific evidence that the present level of oyster farming operations by Drakes Bay Oyster Co. (DBOC) has major adverse effects on the ecosystem of Drakes Estero, a body of water north of San Francisco within Point Reyes National Seashore, which is owned by the National Park Service. The report adds that the adverse or beneficial effects of oyster farming cannot be fully understood given the existing data and analyses. Furthermore, the National Park Service report "Drakes Estero: A Sheltered Wilderness Estuary" in some instances selectively presented, overinterpreted, or misrepresented the available scientific information on DBOC operations by exaggerating the negative and overlooking potentially beneficial effects.

In 1976 when a commercial shellfish operation existed in Drakes Estero, Congress designated it as a potential wilderness area. The Department of the Interior, which oversees NPS, has indicated that the oyster farm now located on Drakes Estero conflicts with full wilderness status, and upon the termination of the farm's lease in 2012, NPS should proceed with converting the area to wilderness. Recently, various versions of the NPS' Drakes Estero report have stimulated public debate over whether scientific information justifies closing DBOC after the lease expires. The debate led to the request for a Research Council study to help clarify the environmental issues connected with oyster farming in Drakes Estero and assess the scientific basis for the NPS presentations, reports, revisions, and a clarification document. The study was not an inquiry into potential scientific misconduct and made no such determinations.

While examining the impacts of oyster farming, the committee that wrote the report affirmed that effects on the estero are derived from two sources: the presence and biological processes of the oysters and the activities of the oyster farmers. As in other bodies of water, the magnitude and significance of the ecological impacts from oyster farming vary with the intensity of operations. Oysters filter materials from the water as well as excrete materials that sink to the bottom. To some extent, the oysters in Drakes Estero replace the filtering and material processing that was lost more than a hundred years ago when the native Olympia oysters were overharvested, but insufficient information is available to know how many oysters and how much biomass existed under these historical baseline conditions.