In the 1930’s, hurricanes and disease wiped out all of the eelgrass on the Seaside of Virginia’s Eastern Shore.  As a result, the ecosystem of the bays between the mainland and the barrier islands nearly collapsed.  Bay scallops, which rely on eelgrass beds as habitat, disappeared and other finfish and crabs that also relied on the grass beds became scarce.  This was major blow to the local economy.  This once abundant and diverse system was decimated and remained so for almost 80 years.  The hypothesis as to why the system didn’t recover was that the storms had changed the geology and hydrodynamics such that the waters were too turbid for eelgrass to survive.

Today, eelgrass beds planted with Virginia CZM funding on the Seaside of Virginia's Eastern Shore have spread to over 9,000 acres and the bay scallop has been re-introduced. 

In the late 1990’s, a scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Dr. Robert Orth, had strong doubts about the hypothesis that seaside waters could not support eelgrass.  He observed that the water clarity was actually quite good, and he soon discovered a tiny patch of eelgrass in one of the seaside bays.  Dr. Orth contacted the Virginia CZM Program and asked for funding to conduct exploratory research.  In 1999, a small amount of CZM funding was provided to test the efficacy of harvesting seeds from plants in the York River and dispersing them in a Seaside bay.

Virginia Seaside Heritage Program 

The seeds germinated and grew well, so Virginia CZM continued to fund the research, and in 2002 initiated a major restoration effort – the Seaside Heritage Program to capitalize on the early positive results.  Virginia CZM’s $2,635,000 Seaside Heritage Program ran from 2002–2008.  In addition to eelgrass restoration, the Seaside Heritage Program included work on ecotourism promotion and infrastructure construction, invasive reed removal, shorebird habitat research, shorebird predator removal, aquaculture BMPs, oyster inventory and reef construction,  and public outreach efforts.

When Virginia CZM initially convened government, academic and non-profit partners to lay out the goals and objectives of the Seaside Heritage Program, it settled on an audacious goal – to bring back a sufficient acreage of eelgrass to allow for the re-introduction of the bay scallop.  It seemed a pipe dream in 2002.

But, the investment of Virginia CZM yielded highly productive habitat and a great success story.

Virginia CZM invested $654,000 in eelgrass research and restoration between 2002 and 2008 and another $1,210,000 in eelgrass and bay scallop restoration between 2009 and 2018, for a total investment of about $1,860,000 over 16 years.