Advocates argue that restoring the oyster reefs that once armoured shorelines could help to buffer against extreme storms. Facebook Email Workers for the Billion Oyster Project prepare to place juvenile oysters in a waterway running through New York City. New York City As the Sun dropped behind the Statue of Liberty on Saturday, a staff member for a conservation group unlocked a gate on a nearby island to reveal the ingredients for a potential oyster renaissance: stacks of ‘reef balls’, large domes made of oyster shells and concrete . They will soon be placed in tanks filled with free-swimming oyster larvae. Once the larvae latch onto the balls and mature, the structures will be submerged in the murky waters off New York City in an effort to revive a lost ecosystem. Coastlines around the globe were once protected by oyster reefs, expansive masses of oysters that had fused to rocks and each other. Overharvesting and habitat loss have demolished about 85% of Earth’s oyster reefs in the past two centuries. But bringing them back could help coastlines to become more resilient to the effects of climate change, including intense storms and erosion , scientists say. Can floating homes make coastal communities resilient to climate risk? The Billion Oyster Project, a non-profit organization in New York City, is leveraging the bivalve’s engineering skills to slowly build a living breakwater. After a decade of refining the process, the project is generating know-how for other efforts that it has inspired elsewhere. “The foundations are there to rebuild these ecosystems, and there are considerable environmental and social benefits of doing this,” says Melanie Bishop, a marine ecologist at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. But it is still unknown 1 whether restored reefs can grow large enough to buffer coastlines , and oyster-restoration proponents […]