Estuary & Ocean Science Center
2016 – $15,000 General Support
2015 – $15,000 General Support
The Estuary & Ocean Science (EOS) Center is located on the Romberg Tiburon Campus of San Francisco State University, with a mission to connect science, society, and the sea. The EOS Center is the only marine lab on San Francisco Bay, and leads scientific study of the Bay with a diverse population of undergraduate and graduate students. The center’s strong focus on advancing the understanding and practice of restoration has increasingly incorporated restoration as a mechanism to address and mitigate climate change impacts.
The EOS Center is creating native oyster habitats to restore large acreages of native Olympia oysters. These structures will also provide shoreline protection in an era of sea level rise. The Seed Fund supported one of the first projects dedicated to oyster rehabilitation in the Bay Area, to conduct early steps in producing innovative designs for lightweight and modular oyster reef systems that can be installed by researchers and volunteers without the need for expensive equipment. These creative oyster reef designs will benefit communities in need of shoreline protection regardless of location or economic status. The EOS Center leveraged support from the Seed Fund into additional funding from the State Coastal Conservancy and Marin Community Foundation (working with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Studio for Urban Projects), and has placed a new reef design at three locations in San Francisco Bay to test their success before scaling them up to larger areas to aid in shoreline protection.