The United States has a $16 billion seafood deficit that the U.S. Department of Commerce and states are attempting to close by legislative policies, encouraging expansion of aquaculture in the United States. One of these policies, the 2011 National Shellfish Initiative, recognizes the benefits to water quality of cultivation of bivalve shellfish aquaculture in addition to the provision of seafood product. More recently, research addressing these policies has resulted in approval of the use of harvested oysters as a nutrient best management practice in the Chesapeake Bay region. Also discussed, but not yet fully implemented, is the inclusion of oyster growers in nutrient credit trading programs where economic compensation is provided to oyster growers for the nutrient removal ecosystem service that their oysters provide. This study used field sampling and a local-scale oyster production model to compare water quality, oyster production, and oyster associated nitrogen removal at two bottom and four water-column Maryland Chesapeake Bay oyster farms. Objectives were to highlight differences in water quality (i.e., oyster food), resultant differences in oyster production, and differences in estimated oyster-associated nutrient removal among farms. An avoided, or replacement, cost economic valuation analysis was performed to also compare the potential payment to the oyster growers for the nutrient removal service if they were included in a fully developed nutrient credit trading program. Production at the six sites varied from 1.78 to 25 metric tons of harvestable oysters acre–1 y–1. Oyster filtration–related N removal was estimated to be at a range of 28–457 kg N acre–1 y–1. The potential economic value of the total N removed by a farm was estimated to be at a range of $0.56 × 103–$12,446 × 103 y–1 among farm sites, depending on the alternative management measure used to assign the value.
