Back to the Bays Marks a Milestone
2025 marks the 10-Year Anniversary of Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Back to the Bays Initiative! In our first decade of operation, Back to the Bays has successfully established numerous long-term receiving areas for habitat and shellfish restoration, known as our Stewardship Sites. These sites are at the heart of what we do and have enabled us to put our community-supported restoration model to work over the past decade.
Back to the Bays Stewardship Sites
It has taken years to establish these sites. From site selection and permitting, to pilot plantings and monitoring, a tremendous amount of science and planning goes into choosing where we are able to realize the most impactful improvements to our coastal and marine environments. As of today, we have 7 Stewardship Sites that are home to newly established oyster reefs, eelgrass meadows, and sanctuaries that receive annual clam and scallop plantings.
We also operate 3 Production Sites, where our team is producing spat-on-shell oysters for our oyster reefs, cultivating hard clams and bay scallops for seeding at our sites, raising coastal plants for our wetland and dune restoration projects, and caring for eelgrass seeds and adult shoots used for plantings. These sites and facilities also serve as inspiring educational settings for our devoted community members.
Maintaining our growing network of Stewardship Sites requires an immense amount of work growing, caring for, planting, seeding, and monitoring these key species; and that’s where you come in! By signing on as a Steward or Site Sponsor you are supporting this essential work, and enabling us to offer unique, hands-on involvement opportunities through our Stewardship Sessions that are offered weekly as we ramp up our busy field season. Please join or renew today so we can keep this momentum going.
We have some expansion plans (announcements regarding that news coming soon!), as well as some exciting collaborations and events in the works to celebrate our 10-Year Anniversary, so please make sure you are on our mailing list, registered as a Steward, and following us on our new dedicated social media accounts @backtothebays so you stay in the know about everything we have on the horizon.
Thank you for your continued support. We couldn’t have accomplished all of this without you, and we are looking forward to having you along for the journey as we venture into the next 10 years of Giving Back to the Bays!
With gratitude,
Kimberly Barbour
Back to the Bays Director
