Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
This past August, the Army Corps of Engineers took us out to the Lynnhaven River, showing us their research to help restore the oyster population. Now, they’re into the next phase of the project; sanctuary reef construction.
Earlier this summer, Army Corp of Engineers lead Scientist Dave Schulte and researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science spent time looking at ways to give baby oysters their best shot at survival in the Lynnhaven River.
Now they can start applying what they learned.
To find the best locations to build sanctuary reefs for the oysters, they are combining modern technology, like hydrodynamic modeling, with historical reef information; data that in some cases is more than a century old.
"New information from the model lets us know what is going on today. It lets us know where the oyster larvae are going to land given where they came from, their origin,” said Schulte. “What the historical information gives us is what does it really take to turn this oyster population around and how big these reefs used to be."
Now, and over the coming few weeks, crews will dredge the James River, digging out a buried, fossilized oyster reef. The process breaks up the reef, and the shells are brought down by barge to the Lynnhaven River.
Water cannons blast the shells off the barges onto the riverbed, and the new reefs are about twelve inches thick.
In the spring of 2008, millions of baby Lynnhaven oysters will be seeded on the newly constructed reefs.
When the project is complete, the Army Corp of Engineers hopes to have established about 30 acres of sanctuary reef.
As the protected oysters mature, they should help improve the water quality ultimately enhance the entire Lynnhaven ecosystem.
"The fishing is going to be better,” said Schulte. “These oyster reefs attract a lot of large fish. There's a lot of food on these reefs and I expect the hook and line guys are going to be pretty happy about this project."
We will be back out there for the next phase of the project, in the spring, when they seed the baby oysters.
