When Susan Cook-Patton was doing a postdoc in forest restoration at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland seven years ago, she says, she helped plant 20,000 trees along Chesapeake Bay. It was a salutary lesson.
“But we could use aquaculture to replace some of those water filtration benefits, and at the same time grow food.” In places where excess nutrients are a problem, like the Chesapeake Bay, shellfish aquaculture could even help offset the negative environmental impacts of other industries.