Jan De Nul has developed a start-to-finish approach to restore oyster reefs.
“ With our newly developed Oyster Reef Restoration Unit, we can seed hard substrates like rocks with around one million young oysters within just a few weeks, anywhere in the world. Combined with our extensive experience in rebuilding marine ecosystems and our fleet of offshore installation vessels, it allows us to deliver oyster reef projects from a to z ,” Jan De Nul said.
“For the first time, we used our Oyster Reef Restoration Unit to seed rocks with young oysters and install them at an offshore location. We seeded two thousand rocks, that function as hard reef substrates, with 1.2 million young oysters and lowered them to the bottom of the North Sea, 40 kilometers off the Belgian coast.”
For the recent installation, the unit was operated in partnership with the Aquaculture & ARC laboratory at Ghent University. During the remote setting campaign, 5 million oyster larvae were introduced into the system. Around 1.2 million successfully settled on the reef material and developed into juvenile oysters.
The process took five weeks in total.