New techniques for monitoring American oyster (Crassostrea virginica) recruitment in the intertidal zone

Changes in oyster reef size, organism density, and community organization can occur randomly or in relation to controlling biotic and abiotic factors. Non-random spatial discontinuities may be interpreted as ecologically important edges and could provide important insights into habitat quality, settlement, recruitment, competition, predation, and other ecological processes. In this study, vertical settlement tubes were deployed along an estuarine transect to document variable invertebrate recruitment to intertidal oyster reef communities. A Squared Euclidean Distance algorithm with a moving window filter was utilized to identify discontinuities in community recruitment. The sampling and analytical approaches provided useful insights into recruitment patterns which could be related to intra-estuarine physical and chemical variability. These and related techniques can likely be used to address regional and estuary-wide shellfisheries-related problems.