Graduate Summer Fellow Nicholas Ray Authors Paper on Oyster Denitrification in Coastal Ecosystems

Nicholas Ray, a PhD candidate in the Department of Biology and a 2019 Pardee Center Graduate Summer Fellow, is the first author of a recent paper exploring oysters’ denitrification ability.

In the paper, published in Marine Ecology Progress Series (MEPS), Ray and his co-authors demonstrate that the oyster digestive system can remove significant amounts of nitrogen from coastal ecosystems, at rates potentially exceeding that of sediment denitrification. They conclude that restoring oyster populations may provide an important ecosystem service in estuaries with excess anthropogenic nitrogen. Maria Henning, a co-author on the paper, contributed research from her Honors Thesis as a Marine Science major at BU. Her work was funded in part by the BU Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Rhode Island Sea Grant provided funding for this work to Ray’s PhD advisor and paper co-author, Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow Prof. Robinson Fulweiler.

Read the paper here.

This summer at the Pardee Center, Ray is developing a predictive model to estimate how much oyster aquaculture can reduce excess nitrogen in coastal ecosystems, potentially allowing for the inclusion of oyster aquaculture in coastal nutrient management policies.