Oysters in the City: Analyzing Data to Guide Coastal Restoration in New York City

Overview

Although people may picture ecologists working in the field, much of their time is spent analyzing and reporting on collected data.  Large amounts of field data must be summarized numerically and visually to provide information that can guide ongoing and future conservation efforts.  In this exercise, students will explore these techniques by connecting output produced by the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) in their annual monitoring reports to raw data stored in spreadsheets.

Objectives

Students should be able to

• Define the field of restoration ecology and discuss the steps needed to restore or supplement populations

• Define adaptive management and explain its importance to restoration ecology

• Describe the importance of maintaining and storing data for restoration projects

• Discuss why oysters are the focus of multiple restoration efforts

• Use built-in functions to produce numerical and visual summaries of data that has been saved in a spreadsheet-style program 

• Discuss how summarized data may offer insight on restoration progress and future directions

Lab Activity

Today's lab follows a lab guide that can be downloaded here:  https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/bitstreams/62b0e120-e826-415c-8023-41125483dba4/download.  Relevant files are linked below.

Background and Files

• New York City Oyster Monitoring Report 2018

• Data files