At William & Mary’s Batten School & VIMS is in collaboration with the Virginia Marine Resources Commission is a newly developed interactive data platform. This newly developed technology is transforming how scientists, managers, watermen and the public understand Virginia’s wild oyster population. The tool was developed as part of the Research Experience for Undergraduates project, which was led by former graduate Ellen Rowe ‘25.
This project was named the Virginia Oyster Stock Assessment and Replenishment Archive (VOSARA) 2. This website converts more than two decades of oysters caught from fishing into a dynamic, Geographic Information System (GIS) based visualization tool. This platform allows users to explore changes in variables such as oyster abundance, shell volume and harvest status across Virginia’s public oyster grounds from 1998 to 2025.
This includes data from watermen, shellfish buyers, industry representatives and other interested parties. She worked alongside Senior Marine Scientist Melissa SouthWorth, who worked alongside Mann in the Molluscan Ecology Laboratory at the Battle School of Coastal & Marine Sciences & VIMS. Nearing Rowe’s graduation in May 2025, Mann and Southworth used funds from their lab and a grant from a previous project to hire Rowe as a GIS analyst through June 2026.
The goal of their project was to be able to visualize data instead of having to dig through spreadsheets. The main feature of the tool is a time slider that allows users to see changes at the reef level on a year-by-yearly basis. When the “play” button is played, it displays different variables that change over time. Users can zoom from the bay, down to tributaries, and to individual reefs, toggle between data layers such as small oysters, spat, market oysters, and brown shell volume. They are also able to view harvest closures and shell replenishment locations on the map, along with the reef’s conditions.
This project has been something that the Batten School & VIMS scientists have worked on for decades. Since 1993, Battle School & VIMS scientists have worked in partnership with the VMRC to conduct annual fishery-independent surveys of public oyster reefs in Virginia’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay. Those surveys measured oyster abundance by shell volume, recruitment, size class and disease levels. These surveys have created one of the longest-running oyster monitoring datasets in the United States.
They originally had a website named VOSARA, in which those data were publicly available, however, it required Southworth to manually enter each year’s survey results and written summaries documenting changes in each individual reef.
After two years of developing VOSARA 2.0, they are now able to update the dataset within weeks of completing each year’s survey and those changes would then be automatically visualized on the user’s end. The launch of VOSARA 2.0 stands as an example of ingenuity and possibilities that arise when combining academics with aquaculture.
