USING A HIGH RESOLUTION, MECHANISTIC MODEL OF FILTRATION, BIODEPOSITION, HYDRODYNAMICS, AND SEDIMENT BIODGEOCHEMISTRY IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE DRIVING FORCES BEHIND NITROGEN DYNAMICS ON OYSTER REEFS

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2022

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The overarching goal of this work was to develop a modeling tool that can provide quantitative predictions of ecosystem services related to N removal and biomass production using oyster restoration metrics such as reef size and oyster planting densities. I expanded the predictive capability of an existing advection-diffusion model of particle capture on an oyster reef to incorporate oyster biodeposit production, transport, and relationship to nutrient cycling. The resulting oyster reef filtration, biodeposition, and ecosystem services model (ReeFBioDES) utilizes modeled or measured current velocities, temperature, salinity, and chlorophyll-a in a given reef environment (reef length, oyster size and density) to predict spatial patterns of biodeposition production, transport, and denitrification. I applied the model at Little Neck Reef in Harris Creek (Choptank River) over an annual cycle for a range of oyster densities and found the model reproduced both the spatial dynamics of along-reef water-column concentrations of TSS, as well as generating rates of on-reef denitrification that are comparable to recently measured rates in experimental incubations of intact oyster clumps from Harris Creek. The model is now available for scenarios simulations to quantify ecosystem services associated with ongoing and future oyster restoration sites in Chesapeake Bay and other temperate coastal ecosystems that C. virginica occupies.

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