Restore Our Shores Oyster Gardening and Living Shorelines — Melbourne, Florida

Oyster gardening is a volunteer program run by Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, through its nonprofit East Coast Zoological Foundation, that turns private docks along the Indian River Lagoon into oyster nurseries. According to the program's oyster gardening page, lagoon-front residents attend a workshop, collect shells covered in juvenile oysters, called spat, and hang them off their docks and pilings in cages for approximately six to nine months. The gardeners clean the cages and record growth; the grown oysters are then collected at a homecoming event and planted on restoration reefs.

The data from each dock does double duty. The program states that measurements from gardeners' oysters point the zoo team to the best locations for new reefs, and that the project has grown over 500,000 live oysters. Brevard Zoo, on the north side of Melbourne along Wickham Road, is the base for training and for the spat pickups.

The program sets a short list of requirements. A volunteer needs a dock on the Indian River Lagoon in Brevard County, or membership in an HOA community with a shared dock. Oysters need the brackish water of the lagoon, so docks on freshwater lakes, ponds, rivers and creeks do not qualify, and a dock on an inland Melbourne lake cannot host a garden. Gardeners commit one to two hours a week to cleaning the habitats, must be able to lift 30 pounds, and should not be away for more than two weeks during the gardening season, which runs from fall into summer.

Each new Brevard County gardener receives roughly 35 to 60 oyster shells, with anywhere from none to 30 or 40 spat on each, and splits them between two cages. People without a dock can still take part: the program pairs them as backup caretakers for gardeners who travel. Returning gardeners sign up again for each season's spat distribution, and freshwater-side homes are directed to other volunteer jobs such as reef building.

The oysters go onto reefs that the Brevard Zoo team builds in the Indian River Lagoon. Its reef page describes a design built from coquina, a limestone made of compressed shell, laid as a perimeter around a permitted footprint, then filled with fossilized shell and topped with recycled oyster shell, with live gardened oysters added where natural settlement is weak. The program reports 170,000 square feet of oyster reef built as of 2026.

The pace has grown each year. In 2023 the team built 18 reefs in the north basin of the lagoon, about 13,700 square feet, and completed its first coquina reef, which the zoo reported eliminated manmade material from its projects. The 2024 season wrap-up reported just over 27,000 square feet and the program's 100th oyster reef, and quoted the senior conservation manager saying the team was seeing more and more natural recruitment of wild oysters in the Melbourne area, after several years of concentrated building in that part of the lagoon.

In 2025 the team built just over 52,000 square feet of reef, nearly double the year before, using a full-time construction crew and its own barge, according to Brevard Zoo. The same year it seeded about 12,000 live oysters onto new reefs and received the Florida Nature Conservation Award from the Florida Association of Zoos and Aquariums for its oyster work.

The program's living shoreline page defines a living shoreline as a nature-based approach to shoreline protection, used instead of hardened structures such as seawalls, bulkheads and rock revetments. It is built from vegetation, marsh, oyster reefs and other natural features to control erosion, absorb wave energy and filter pollutants. For Melbourne and other Brevard waterfront owners, the program offers site checks to residents who live on the lagoon and want to know if their property suits this kind of restoration.

The program places living shorelines alongside related work on mangroves, seagrass, clams and native-plant buffer zones between lagoon yards and the water. Its seagrass is grown in two nurseries, one in Rockledge and one at the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute in Melbourne Beach, which marked a full year of operation in fall 2024 according to the zoo's 2024 season report.

Oyster work in Melbourne predates the current reef program. A Florida Tech student post dated Dec. 9, 2012 reported that Brevard Zoo and volunteers had replaced over 28,000 oyster mats and restored about 50 reefs in the lagoon, and that the university's Tri Beta biology honor society chapter built 20 to 30 mats at a single meeting each academic year. Each mat used 36 oyster shells, a piece of aquaculture-grade mesh and zip ties.

Florida Tech ran its own program as well. In April 2017, Florida Institute of Technology's Indian River Lagoon Research Institute invited the public to an Earth Day oyster mat workshop on the lawn of the Link Building on the Melbourne campus. Those mats went to the Living Docks program, which hangs shell-covered mats from dock pilings so oysters, sponges, barnacles and tunicates settle there. The university stated that healthy adult oysters can filter 50 gallons of water per day.

The shell comes largely from restaurants. Through Shuck and Share, restaurants, seafood festivals and distributors set aside discarded oyster and clam shells, and the program reports collecting around 8 million pounds of shell to date for gardening and reef building. Brevard County is the main public funder: the partners page says the Brevard County Natural Resources Management Department and the County Commissioners fund supplies for hundreds of oyster gardeners, while the St. Johns River Water Management District supports oyster mat work through sales of its lagoon license plate, known as the snook tag. Zoo reports from 2023 and 2024 credit Brevard County's half-cent lagoon sales tax program, approved by voters in 2016, with funding the reefs.

Research now runs alongside construction. A study funded by a Restore America's Estuaries grant with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency money collects ten oysters each month from four sites across Brevard County to examine spat settlement and oyster reproductive health, because the zoo team has seen a lack of consistent spawning in the Brevard part of the lagoon. The zoo says the study also supports Brevard County's plan to construct 14.5 acres of oyster reef.