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good afternoon everybody welcome to the public presentation of research from the 2014 outer banks field site i'm andy keeler director of the site the outer banks field site for those who don't know is a rigorous residential program for upper level unc undergraduates and hopefully in the future undergraduates of other unc institutions and it just there's a full academic schedule internships a variety of cultural and experiential activities and of course the focus of what you're going to see today which is the group research project on behalf of the faculty and students of the field side i'd like to start by thanking some of the people that made this year's program such a success in particular our community advisory board has been just great in terms of passing on their knowledge of eastern north carolina and the outer banks region and in making the students feel at home led by our wonderful chairperson beth story and i'd also particularly like to recognize robert perry the former director of the site for so many years who's been so helpful to everybody the field site has been i mean the board has been just great and helping the students not only feel at home but understand the context of eastern north carolina for their research this project would simply not have been possible without the cooperation and collaboration of joey daniels of the juanchi seafood company and his staff i can't imagine a better research partner than joey's been he's given full access to faculty and students answered thousands of our in the case of faculty really stupid questions been amazingly patient um never sought to influence the research in any way other than seek what was what was contributing to knowledge so again from all of us thank you so much joy for everything you've done for us this year i'd also like to thank all of the internship member mentors part of this field site is an intensive internship program that's 16 hours a week all of you who helped the students and taught them so much thank you very much i'd like to now recognize our outstanding outer ranks field type faculty corey adams lindsey dubs lee laidy and adam gibson who did so much for the students and have done such an exceptional job it's our our great loss that adam gibson is leaving us for an exciting opportunity at the university of oklahoma adam has done a such a great job of bringing rigor to the social science data collection and analysis part of this field site it's something that we hope very much and will work hard to continue it's going to be hard to do without you so thank you so much for everything you've done good luck and we certainly hope you come back and visit us frequently even in the winter when it's too cold to surf um we'd also like to thank brian ness and amanda kichla of the institute of environment at unc chapel hill for being here today the institute of environment is the coastal studies institute partner in this enterprise and we're very grateful for their collaboration and support a couple things about the research we've asked the students to take on a very complex topic in a very short amount of time there's no we told them there's no right or wrong answers and their task was to use the tools of rigorous academic research and analysis and interpretation to learn something new and then be able to pass it on to you guys so part of what you're going to see is not just what they've learned but how they've learned it you're going to be seeing methodology and statistics in addition to just results so be beware and be warned and secondly they've done a lot in a short amount of time if they had a couple more months they would be able to do even better but anything that's still unresolved that you guys have expertise on they would be delighted to hear from you and hear your opinions about this specifically and natural resource management on the outer banks generally so please stay and talk to them afterwards there's a written report that goes along with this it's available with a few written copies back there as well as pdf copies on flash drives you'll also be able to download it just by googling obx-fs and finally a couple things please turn your cell phones to vibrate or off during the presentation and if you don't mind please hold your questions to the end of the presentation to let the students get through and now i'd like to introduce our site outstanding associate director lindsey dubs thank you andy and thank you everyone for coming to this year's capstone presentation i have the pleasure of introducing the few but mighty outer banks field site 2014 class so i'm going to just go ahead and jump right into that first jerome allen is a junior from greenville north carolina he's majoring in environmental studies and dramatic arts quentin grady is a senior from goldsboro north carolina he is majoring in environmental studies dakota koenigsberg is a senior from from arden north carolina and he's double majoring in economics and environmental studies charlotte mckeon is a senior from durham north carolina she is also a double major but she's a double major in public policy and environmental studies michaela meredith is a junior from elon north carolina she's majoring in environmental studies and finally john saint claire is a relatively local student he's from camden north carolina and is a senior studying environmental studies so john is actually going to start us off today introducing the project so i'll just hand it right over to you john all right thank you lindsay hi we're the outer banks field site of 2014. i would like to thank you all for coming out this afternoon we really appreciate seeing you here our project today or our presentation is titled the oyster banks a dive into the political scientific and social realms of oysters and oyster aquaculture in north carolina we'd like to give thanks to people that have helped us along the way our community board of advisors internship mentors and people that have spoken with us throughout various field trips we've taken during the semester we'd also like to like to give special thanks to joey daniels bill and ellen keely allison lewis stephanie o'daley corey adams and the northeast north carolina coastal research environmental education fund to get started oyster trend or oysters in north carolina the population has been decimated over the past 100 years due to various reasons one being over harvesting others such as disease and habitat loss this has not only resulted in a loss of the oysters themselves but also a loss in ecosystem services that are associated with oyster reefs and ecosystem services are simply the benefits that people receive from ecosystems they're the reason we care about oysters the obvious ecosystem service that oysters provide is food a source of food and a source of income but they also provide other ecologically important benefits as well such as nutrient regulation water filtration and habitat provision for many species of fish the oyster we studied this semester was the eastern oyster it's a bi-valve mollusk that can live for up to 40 years can grow to eight inches in length and typically lives in water with salinity concentrations of 12 parts per thousand and temperatures between 34 degrees fahrenheit and 97 degrees fahrenheit the ecosystem services provided by these oysters in particular are nutrient regulation water filtration habitat provision and shoreline protection however the ecosystem services that we studied most in our research was nutrient regulation water filtration and habitat provision so this is a diagram of the ecosystem services provided by a wild oyster reef as you can see you have all types of creatures living inside the reef itself but you also have the refiltering the water surrounding the reef this takes particles suspended particles out of the water and deposits them on the bottom of the sound providing nutrients for the growth of submerged aquatic vegetation the addition or the improved water clarity also allows more sunlight to penetrate the water column and provide sunlight for photosynthesis for these submerged aquatic vegetation and submerged aquatic vegetation are just marine plants that provide habitat to many valuable commercial fish species in north carolina it's considered critical fish habitat policy and policy regulations aquaculture is seen as a threat to sav and this has limited the number of permits that have been approved for aquaculture operations so aquaculture is just a term used for the farming of marine organisms in their natural habitats it's has a potential to decrease to decrease the pressures that are currently on wild oyster reef populations improving or improving the amount of aquaculture in north carolina would not only reduce pressures on wild reefs by adding more oysters into the water that could be taken out instead of these wild oysters but it also reduces pressure on them or allows them to produce more ecosystem services and our research wanted to find out if the aquaculture facilities had ecosystem services of their own and we also wanted to research any effects on sav that aquaculture facilities might have so there were three strands of our research we had a natural science component which studied potential ecosystem services that aquaculture facilities might have to offer we studied a social science component which helped us understand public attitudes towards oysters and oyster aquaculture in the state and a policy consideration which allowed us to consider how policies regarding oysters and oyster aquaculture in north carolina have affected the industry and potentially limited its growth and now i'm going to turn the mic over to charlotte mcewen who will give a little bit more information on the natural science portion of our capstone research thank you john to begin we'll be looking at the natural science research that we conducted the four main components of this research was looking at the habitat provided by the aquaculture facility and the effect that the aquaculture facility has on water quality nutrient regulation and siv abundance and distribution now to give you a better understanding of where our study took place here's a satellite image of our study site it's approximately where the roanoke sound and the pamlico sounds meet and this arrow indicate indicates the aquaculture site that we studied just to the south and to the north are our two control sites the control site to the south was adjacent to a natural island and the control site to the north was adjacent to a drug spoil island and because the aquaculture site is also adjacent to a drug soil island the control site to the north had more similar conditions and thus most of our research took place at that control site the wonky's harbor is located 2.14 miles away from where we studied and the oregon inlet is located 3.56 miles with the close proximity to oregon inlet there is a high degree of flushing and a high salinity concentration at our study sites this map is the map that we used while at the facility to orient ourselves it's oriented from north to south and the dark gray are boating canals used for navigation and the white is where oysters are actually deployed the black dots indicate poles that are in the water to section off different areas and quadrants of the facility and the dark gray rectangle labeled shed is basically the headquarters of the aquaculture facility and is where all equipment and gear is kept now joey uses two methods of growing his oysters the first being floating bags as you can see here and the bags are oriented in lines and they're floating on the water with the oysters inside and the second method is using submerged racks which you can see here well that was planned but thank you so these racks are comprised of three cages stacked on top of each other and they are underwater and in the picture you can see what the cages actually look like when there are oysters inside we now have a short video to show you to give you a better idea of what the facility looks like so as you can see in the video these lines are the submerged bags like you can see on the floor over there um and to the right you can see the drag spoil island which is located .04 miles away from the facility and the site is ran by joey and his team of three employees he submitted his leasing permit in july of 2011 and first began harvesting oysters in 2013. at the time of our study there were 124 oyster bags and racks deployed in the aquaculture facility over an area of just under 12 acres the floating bags are primarily on the west side of the facility and the bottom racks are primarily on the east side our study took place in september and october of 2014. and in this part of the video you can see the floating bags on the left side and the submerged racks are on the right side of the screen but they are submerged so you can't really see them and i will now pass it over to quentin to talk about habitat provision thank you charlotte get situated so the first portion of our natural science attempted to gauge the value of habitat provided for organisms by aquaculture gear or in short habitat provision we started with two research questions which we then rephrased in the hypotheses the first hypothesis states that oyster aquaculture facilities provide habitat for species that would typically be found near wild oyster reefs but would not otherwise be associated with areas of sandy bottom or sav and this hypothesis was really built in order to find some overall trends in our data and also was built around research that we conducted of what to expect from different organisms species around wild oyster reefs our second hypothesis states the more time elapsed since the initial deployment of an oyster rack the more organisms that an oyster rack will provide habitat for so this hypothesis test temporal relationship we expected to find within the facility and this will be shown through data analysis and some statistics so to kind of describe the methods the overall methods of our research we started with out on joey's facility we took these racks that you see that charlotte described he took them up out of the water with a crane with a tarp below them we loaded them on to this boat as you can see in the picture as well and once we opened it we saw a bunch of oysters inside we started getting our hands getting on our hands and knees with little scoopers and digging out fish and crabs from inside of these racks we found a very large amount of some smaller crabs like there are 200 small mud crabs in one of the rack pools that we had once we got all the crabs and fish out we would put them in aerated buckets to the side and aside from counting these organisms invertebrates and fin fish we also consider the algae that grows on top of the racks so we used a small about quarter sized few squares on each corner of the top during each of our rack pools to measure the algae present which could also provide a food source for some fin fish and invertebrates as well as a component of the habitat of the oyster oyster aquaculture and these scrape samples ended up being used to find total weights and also carbon hydrogen and nitrogen concentrations within the algae the total we found total of eight species of fin fish within our rack pools and six species of invertebrates 84 individual fin fish 387 individual invertebrates we reviewed species of fin fish and invertebrates which typically utilize natural oyster reefs as habitat and we assessed our first hypothesis the utilizing these trends of organisms found and comparing what we found in our research to what we would expect of animals that utilize oyster reefs so to go through these we found five species of fish and two species of crabs at our study site which either utilize oyster reefs as habitat or prey upon oysters including oyster toadfish blinny skillet fish tawtog sheepshead blue crabs and mud crabs kind of outline here what these creatures look like this first guy right here a little oblong shaped fish it's called the oyster toad fish they don't have much of a recreational or commercial value but they are very important within wild oyster reef habitats we found them within our research the feather blinny along with one other type of blinny were found at he site we found a large abundance of mud crabs we also utilized a one centimeter as our cut off for measuring these organisms so we would often find lots of smaller critters such as mud crabs blue crabs even organisms such as tunicates that would be found within the racks and lastly this is a skillet fish which are actually quite rare to find and they are known to utilize natural oyster reeves as habitat so we are very pleased to see them within the oyster aquaculture cages and then this is a tautog which represents a very high recreational value it's a popular sports fish the sheep's head which are found in abundance hold recreational value and then the blue crab which has been said by many to be one of the the most important commercial crab within north america and definitely expect to find those here so aside from just what we found from the organisms present within the racks our research supported some trends that we found within other research previous research we found that juvenile fish utilized oyster aquaculture gear habitat especially which is very important aside from just the habitat value presented to overall organisms as well the tawtog which we found present has been shown in previous studies to prefer submerged aquaculture gear so this is also supportive of our hypothesis and lastly joey when he laid out his aquaculture facility he utilizes the headquarters that charlotte showed you in the study site flyover there's a large board within the headquarters that has a huge amount of dates numbers of every single rack pool and deployment that he's used and our second hypothesis which compared the total number of organisms with the time of deployment this was tested through a linear regression and an exponential regression as you can see the exponential regression showed a little bit tighter of a correlation this data practically shows us that with further study we would expect to see this temporal relationship between deploying oyster racks having initial oysters inside of these racks which provide food source for different species of fin fish and selfish and then finally support further relationships between the organisms present and now michaela meredith can tell you some more about natural science thank you thank you quentin the next two ecosystem services that we looked at were water clarity and nutrient regulation these are important in understanding how sav abundance and distribution might be affected at an aquaculture facility as you can see water filtration and nutrient cycling provided by oysters highly effects sav growth this picture on the left is actually from one of our first capstone meetings here at csi it was very hastily drawn on the board but we were trying to decide what ecosystem services we wanted to look at this really shows how you can see the oysters on the right are filtering particulate matter out of the water column and they're redeposing it into the sediment surface through their feces in the sediment surface these particulates are re-mineralized which means they're changed into a form that sav and algae can use for growth furthermore as these particulates are being filtered out of the water column it leads to better water clarity and more sunlight can penetrate the water and reach sav each of these ecosystem services use different methods however there are three treatments across the board that we used inside refers to the inside of the aquaculture facility you can see in the map it's what's highlighted in blue outside refers to the outside or the perimeter of the aquaculture facility and the control site was simply the same across both sites regarding water clarity our primary question was how does oyster aquaculture affect water clarity using light as a proxy as compared to a control site with no oysters we hypothesize that water clarity would be in fact improved at the aquaculture oyster facility we use the lycor sensor which can be seen on the picture on the right to measure photosynthetically active radiation or par this is simply the light levels that sav can use for photosynthesis these light levels were measured at both the surface and the top of the sav at multiple sites along the perimeter and inside of the aquaculture facility we then converted the par levels into light extinction coefficients using the lambert beer equation or k sub d and the case of d or like extinction coefficient is simply how much water is penetrating the water column and changing with depth results show that overall there was a higher light extinction coefficient at the control site which means that water clarity was improved or tended to be clear at the aquaculture facility and just give you a better idea of what a high light extinction coefficient means versus a low like extinction coefficient it's a little bit backwards of what you would typically assume a higher one means that there's less light reaching the sav there's more particulate matter in the water that's blocking how much sunlight reaches the sav and when you have a lower light extinction coefficient that means there's greater light penetrating the surface and reaching the sap and the one on the right with the lower light extinction coefficient is what we found at the aquaculture facility which is good the second we looked at was nutrient regulation and we asked how does oyster aquaculture affect nutrient concentrations in the sediment and water column sediment water is also referred to as pore water throughout our presentation we hypothesize that oyster aquaculture affects nutrient concentrations by converting these nutrients in the water column back to the sediment we used pore samples pour water samples and water column samples using a core which basically for the sediment you just stick in and stick a cap over and you can see in the top right picture you have a sediment sample and the water column samples were just taken simply in the water we took these samples back to the lab and looked at phosphate and ammonium concentrations we picked these two nutrients because they're essential to sav and algae growth and algae is what oysters eat these results show that overall there was a statistically significant difference between the nutrient concentrations in the water column and in the pore water however overall we found higher concentrations of ammonium and phosphate at the aquaculture facility these two concentration levels were within the range of quality estuary health therefore which is good next looking at sav abundance and distribution our question was is the density of sav in the study site representative of the density outside the study site we hypothesized that sav density would be greater immediately outside and inside the aquaculture facility than at the control site and this of course was with the exception of the sav that was under the racks their submerged aquatic gear that was at the facility we used two methods for this uh study the first was a simple presence af presence absence method we simply were in the water we bent down using our right and left hands along different transects had been measured off at the facility and we simply noted if they were the presence of sab or if there was an absence on each side the second method also utilized transects however this time we used something called a quadrat and this is one foot by one foot and it's simply dropped into the water vertically and what you do is you pull all the sav out that's within that quadrat we took it back to the lab sorted it by species and measured for shoot density results show that there was in fact a greater concentration of sav outside the aquaculture facility than there was inside however overall density was greater at the control site but because there was no statistically different in the densities between the control and all culture site it does not seem that the gear is actually affecting the sav and overall just to summarize those results again and pull them together water clarity was in fact improved at the facility over the control site nutrients were higher concentrations within good levels ranges at the facility over the control site and while sav was greater in the density of the control site the density found wasn't significantly different from the densities at the aquaculture facility which is a good sign showing that these gear might not be affecting the sav as thought and now i'm going to pass over dakota for social science research thanks michaela given that people drive the demand for oysters and that the public's attitudes will affect the regulatory framework as it pertains to oysters and oyster aquaculture we found it valuable to gauge the public's perceptions knowledge and opinions about oysters we began with a qualitative survey with two industry professionals and used the results of this survey to inform the development of a quantitative survey we deployed this survey at three different locations downtown manio and in two different restaurants one being in nags head and the other in kill devil hills we then took the completed surveys and compiled the results we made statistical summaries which include the percent of responses for each answer choice for every question and we also included means and standard deviations where relevant we then ran independent sample t-tests which test for statistical differences between two variables and we ran analyses of variants or anovas which test for statistical differences between three or more variables we also included an economic component to our social science survey and this manifested in a contingent valuation question which will be discussed shortly two of the questions in our survey were regarding oyster preference and willingness to pay for that preference as you can see in the chart fifty percent of respondents said that they preferred wild harvested oysters over farm-raised oysters however if you limit this to only those who expressed the preference 98 to 99 percent of respondents preferred wild harvested oysters also about 60 percent of respondents said that they are willing to pay more for their preference of oyster we also asked respondents to define what they consider as locally produced food while there were a variety of answers the most common were 50 miles denoted by the yellow circle and 100 miles denoted by the red circle respondents also expressed that it was important to them for the most part that their food was produced locally so we used these t-test and anova results to analyze two variables in particular the first was knowledge for both types of oysters both farm-raised and wild harvested people who had eaten them tended to know significantly more about them however the number of times people had eaten them did not have an additive effect on their knowledge of them so what this suggests is that simply having try them once was enough for people to know more about them also those who said that they were willing to pay more for environmentally friendly produced food tended to know more about oysters the willingness to pay variable was assessed a little bit differently there was an informational paragraph in the survey which explained the benefits of oysters and a farm raised oysters in particular after giving this information respondents were asked whether they were willing to increase their willingness to pay as a result of the information those who were persuaded to increase their willingness to pay tended to believe more strongly that society values and appreciates oysters also those who were persuaded to increase their willingness to pay tended to believe that oysters are useful for more than just food assuming that we want to increase people's preference of and consumption of wild harvested oyste i'm sorry farm-raised oysters as compared to wild harvested oysters there are three strategies that our results suggest the first is that we can increase people's knowledge of the origin of farm-raised oysters as you can see in the chart our study site was well within the 50-mile distance that people consider local so we can appeal the people's preference for local food second we can increase people's knowledge of environmental benefits of farm-raised oysters throughout the survey people expressed that uh they had environmental values especially through their willingness to pay more for environmentally friendly produced food so we can appeal to these environmental values as well and third we can simply get more people to try farm-raised oysters in one of our t-tests we found that there is a significant difference in the knowledge between people who had tried oysters and people who hadn't and while we don't know whether people who already have knowledge of oysters tend to seek them out or whether the actual experience of trying oysters increases people's knowledge of them we think that both are likely present then there was the economic component to our survey which manifested in this contingent valuation question now contingent valuation is a stated preference method that's useful for establishing values for non-market goods for example an ecosystem service the ecosystem service addressed in our contingent valuation question was that of habitat provision the way contingent valuation questions work is that a policy is proposed and respondents are asked whether they would vote for or against the policy the policy in question is the establishment of a oyster seedling nursery within the state which would stimulate the oyster aquaculture industry which would in turn provide more habitat for non-oyster fish species and the end result would be a 10 to 15 percent increase in the amount of fish produced all cv questions also have a payment vehicle which is how the policy in question is to be paid for for in-state residents the policy was to be paid for by a one-time increase in their income tax and we chose five distinct values where each survey had one of these values and you can see the values here after getting the results of this question and with the help of allison lewis from ecu we were able to analyze our results which are presented in this table so there were 103 total respondents that were north carolina residents and we can take two primary things from this table the first is that if our results are valid over 50 percent of people are willing to pay at least 96 dollars to realize this 10 to 15 percent increase in fish production the second thing we can take away is that our range of values was not quite wide enough particularly on the upper end what we would have liked to see is we would have liked to have chosen a value high enough to where we could have observed a significant decline in the demand for oysters however as you can see at every value more than 50 percent of respondents we're willing to pay that price and now jerome allen will talk about policy considerations thank you dakota so we took a look at the scientific and the social perspective around oyster aquacultures we also widened the scope to include the public policy surrounding oyster aquaculture our purpose for doing so was to understand the regulatory framework and policies impacting oyster aquaculture our methods for doing so was looking into north carolina and federal legislation as well as other coastal states and just to frame our research we asked the question why has oyster aquaculture in north carolina remained relatively stagnant so to begin to understand the answer to this question we must establish the flow of power for the state players there are the division of marine fisheries the marine fisheries commission the north carolina sorry there are north carolina general statutes that establish power for the marine fisheries commission the marine fisheries commission delegates authority of oyster resource management to the division of marine fisheries the division of marine fisheries implements a fisheries management plan that parts specifically handles oyster population and managing its ecosystem services so when it comes to oyster aquaculture facilities they are generally affecting the public use of the sounds and when it comes to public use and public interest the public trust doctrine must be taken into account the public trust doctrine labels certain lands and waters for use by the public amongst other protections inc uding recreational uses these regular recreational uses include swimming boating and fishing these lands and waters are protected by the state and cannot be privately owned nor can it be excluded to the discretion of the public so areas used for oyster aquaculture are generally in the public trust land and waters and again these lands are protected by the state and the federal government the federal government being the army corps of engineers and the national oceanic and atmospheric administration or noaa for short now these two organizations collaborated on the federal nationwide permit 48 which is a set of criteria for oyster aquaculture facilities and in for the permit there were 20 public interests were considered including environmental concerns fish and wildlife sav was also included in the decision making the decision documented indicated sav as critical habitat thus under a facility only a half acre of sav is allowed in an aquaculture facility something that is important to note for the joey daniels facility he got his leasing permit before the federal decision document was established so he luckily was grandfathered in but if you were to apply for a lease for an aquaculture facility you are more likely to receive that lease if it is in deeper water without any sav and something else to also take into account is that it is a federal document so it applies throughout the whole nation but state and district offices can apply this either more narrowly or more broadly for the wilmington district office their their application is that there can be no sav present within the site so the public interest and and the federal nationwide permit are taken into account in the north carolina leasing process the leasing process is what you would assume it to be you would have to indicate where the site is and you have to pay a certain a certain amount for processing fees but there are also prerequisites for the site that i had indicated earlier such as you know historical sap presence and the public interest is taken into account because once your lease is basically sealed you have to have a notification requirement that is in the local papers that says where it is and it's up for public comment for up to 30 days and yes so that is just one of the challenges within the oyster aquaculture industry one thing to note is that before a lease or a site can be taken into account you have to pay a survey a survey is basically someone going out and looking for sav in this cost between one thousand to two thousand dollars other challenges are the leasing complexities so if you were to apply at a certain time depending on who's available in the division of marine fisheries and the amount of time and other factors you may not see you might not receive notification within a timely manner the other one of the other challenges that there's only one hatchery in north carolina a hatchery is a place where oysters are reproduced and you purchase a seedling it is to and since there is only one hatchery the demand from that hatchery is extremely high and there are a lot of back orders so a lot of oyster people are forced to outsource their seedlings to virginia and it's in our understanding that if you were to outsource to virginia you are less likely to have preference of getting the seedlings versus virginian oyster people so again looking at the virginia and north carolina comparisons i want to place emphasis on yeah on the 2005 value of the oyster industry in virginia it was 240 000 for north carolina it was 257 thousand dollars roughly and if we look at 2012 for virginia it is 9 million 554 000 and for north carolina roughly 595 000. so it's something to take note of so and we took note of this through looking at other coastal states so for virginia we had noticed that areas are pre-approved for aquaculture and we think that if north carolina were to have pre-approved sites this would reduce the cost of surveys in connecticut and maryland there's a joint permit application there's both this meaning that there is a federal and state application as one in rhode island there are tax exemptions for aquaculture facilities and the equipment that you purchase and in louisiana you are actually able to purchase the esri and bottom so to our our research we have a few options if north carolina were to become successful in the oyster industry we recommend that the application be streamlined uh that there will be a reduced cost of the survey or pre-approved sites the kicks that we kick-start the hatchery industry to reduce outsourcing from virginia and there'll be more research on sav and what i mean by more research is that there be a more holistic approach towards approaching sap what i mean by that is a patch of sav may be compromised but the overall benefits of an oyster aqua facility might should be taken into consideration and now i will pass it off to charlotte for our final conclusions thank you jerome so now that we've presented to you all of this information you might be wondering why it all matters and one of the major reasons is because oyster populations in north carolina have drastically declined and this is problematic because oysters provide ecosystem services and are a valued food source in the state additionally these small oyster populations mean there's a smaller industry or oyster industry in north carolina compared to other coastal states like virginia lastly we found in our social science research that people really highly value eating local oysters and would prefer to eat local oysters however with a small industry it means that many of the oysters being served in north carolina are from out of state now promoting oyster aquaculture can contribute to a growing oyster industry as well as increasing increasing oyster populations however before policies are implemented to promote this industry several things should be considered including the potential economic benefits the potential effects on ecosystems both in terms of the ecosystem services it may provide any effects on sav and lastly the public's perceptions and attitudes should be considered so in our natural natural science research we found that aquaculture may actually improve the quality of ecosystems and improve the conditions for sav we found no decremental impacts on sav and we found that through increased water clarity and nutrient regulation the conditions for sav growth might actually be improved by oyster aquaculture if future research confirms these findings the public seems likely to support the oyster industry and this is based on the fact that 61 percent of the 62 excuse me percent of the people studied were willing to pay more for environmentally produced food and of those people that believe oysters are useful for more than just food they had a higher willingness to pay for oysters again if our findings are confirmed in future research policies regarding oyster aquaculture within the state may want to be revised to more greatly promote the industry in north carolina and we'd like to thank you for your attention and we'll now open the floor up for questions you