Resilient Oyster Industry Community of Practice for Mississippi and Alabama

Objectives

1. Formalize robust stakeholder participation in regular, facilitated, objective-driven exchanges of best management practices, streamlined guidelines, and breakthrough ideas.
2. Enhance participatory decision-making processes that grow the AL and MS oyster industry while also including the voices of coastal communities, populations, industry leaders, local ecological knowledge, and input from scientists.
3. Build a collaborative, nationally recognized platform aimed at adaptation in AL and MS. However, to date any such efforts have been informal and ad hoc, without a much needed collaborative framework to solve urgent problems facing the industry.

Methodology

We propose a Community of Practice for Equitable and Resilient Oyster Industry in AL and MS, or for short the Resilient Oyster Industry COP. Our project will last 18 months and involves experts in human dimensions of fisheries and resilience at Auburn University (PI Kelly Dunning, College of Forestry, Wildlife and Environment); experts in oyster related community engagement (Key Personnel Rusty Grice at the Auburn University Shellfish Lab); and unfunded collaborators at MS-AL Sea Grant Consortium. 

Rationale

Eastern oysters in the Gulf of Mexico (Crassostrea virginica) serve as a powerful symbol for our way of life in Gulf of Mexico communities, but have declined by 85%, leaving significant ecological, economic, and cultural gaps in states like Alabama (AL) and Mississippi (MS), two states with significant economic potential for commercializing oyster production and processing. In the face of the numerous challenges, there is immense potential for stakeholders from the wild fishery, oyster farms, government, scientists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community groups, and coastal communities to continue to build the emerging oyster industry, ensuring its next iteration of growth is sustainable, equitable, and resilient. However, to date any such efforts have been informal and ad hoc, without a much needed collaborative framework to solve urgent problems facing the industry.