Most people think of New York as a concrete jungle. A city defined by streets, skyscrapers, and infrastructure. The harbor often fades into the background, something passed on ferries, glimpsed from waterfront parks, or framed behind apartment towers without much thought about what it actually is. But New York is, and always has been, a water city. Long before the skyline, the harbor shaped the city’s identity, economy, ecology, and growth.
What many people miss is that New York Harbor is one of the most powerful estuaries in the world. A tidal ecosystem connected to wetlands, rivers, migratory species, fisheries, and coastlines stretching far beyond the five boroughs. Even now, beneath one of the most densely populated urban spaces, marine life moves through these waters every day. Humpback whales feed beneath the skyline. Osprey return to nest. Oyster reefs are beginning to re-emerge. The harbor is far more alive than most people realize.
For decades, New Yorkers were taught to look away from the water. Industrialization, pollution, shoreline hardening, and ecological collapse severed the city’s relationship with its harbor. As access disappeared, so did public connection. And when people stop seeing a place as alive, they stop imagining what it could become.
That disconnection sits at the center of why we do what we do at Billion Oyster Project. Restoring oysters is only part of the story. The larger goal is helping people reconnect with the harbor as a vital natural system woven into the future of New York itself. Because the reality is simple: people protect what they feel connected to. And the future of New York Harbor depends on whether enough people begin seeing these waters not as the edge of the city, but as part of its living foundation once again.
New York Harbor was once one of the most productive estuaries on Earth. Oyster reefs stretched across the harbor floor, supporting marine biodiversity, filtering water, stabilizing shorelines, and helping shape the ecological systems surrounding the city. The harbor supported fish populations, migratory birds, wetlands, and all the while, the Lenape people relied on these waters for generations.
Then, colonization took hold. Over centuries of industrialization, dredging, pollution, overharvesting, and development, those reefs disappeared. Shorelines hardened and wetlands vanished. Combined sewer overflows and industrial waste degraded water quality. By 1927, the last commercial oyster bed in New York Harbor had closed. And those oyster beds were truly what built this city and turned it into what it is today.
For decades afterward, the harbor became defined by that ecological collapse. Many New Yorkers grew up thinking of the water as polluted, inaccessible, or disconnected from daily life. The city increasingly turned inward, away from the waterfronts that once defined it. People visiting from all around the world were not coming to New York for its shorelines at all. They were coming for the culture and the allure of the city that never sleeps.
But over the last several decades, conditions in the harbor have slowly begun to change. Water quality has improved. Marine life has returned in ways many people never expected. Billion Oyster Project exists within that turning point. While we’re not the sole reason for a rebound, we are part of it, and we are only just getting started.
For more than a decade, Billion Oyster Project has focused on proving that oyster restoration is possible in New York Harbor. The organization has restored more than 183 million oysters across restoration sites throughout the estuary while building one of the largest urban marine restoration programs in the United States. Today, our question is no longer whether oysters can survive in New York Harbor. Our question is whether restoration can happen at a scale large enough to sustain itself.
Our long-term monitoring has shown that small pilot oyster reefs alone are not enough. While oysters can grow and reproduce in the harbor, mortality still outpaces growth in many areas, and isolated reefs remain vulnerable without larger connected systems surrounding them. Reaching ecological stability requires scale. That realization has fundamentally shifted Billion Oyster Project’s strategy in 2025.
For years, we operated within a constrained range, restoring between 30 and 50 million oysters annually. That work established proof of concept and created the scientific foundation for what came next. But we now see a pathway toward something much larger. In 2026, we are positioned to restore approximately 80 to 85 million oysters in a single year. This is the largest restoration season in our history. By 2027, restoration capacity is projected to reach approximately 140 million oysters annually, followed by roughly 200 million oysters per year by 2028. This transition marks a major shift from pilot restoration into true systems-scale restoration.
But, scaling restoration is not simply about putting more oysters into the water. It means designing a connected harbor-wide reef system capable of functioning as an ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated projects. Reefs must be large enough, dense enough, and connected closely enough to support reproduction and larval dispersal across the estuary. The long-term goal is to establish what scientists call a metapopulation: interconnected reefs capable of seeding one another naturally over time.
Achieving that requires infrastructure, coordination, monitoring, and innovation at an entirely different level than what restoration efforts previously demanded. We are investing in expanded remote setting facilities, restoration barges, monitoring systems, environmental review processes, and data-driven site selection tools designed to support harbor-wide restoration. New technologies and scientific partnerships are helping us better understand larval movement, biodiversity recovery, shoreline conditions, and long-term reef connectivity throughout New York Harbor.
Partners including Natrx, Cornell University, Norwich University, Anemo Robotics, Vycarb, and the American Bird Conservancy are contributing to this broader understanding of how restoration systems function across the harbor. Hydrodynamic larval modeling helps identify how oyster larvae move between restoration sites. Underwater cameras and biodiversity monitoring document how marine ecosystems respond as reefs return. Environmental DNA sampling helps expand biodiversity tracking throughout the estuary. Together, these systems are creating one of the most comprehensive views ever assembled of urban oyster restoration at scale.
What is happening in New York Harbor is increasingly being viewed as a potential blueprint for urban coastal resilience globally.
As restoration scales, we believe public connection to the harbor must scale alongside it. For many New Yorkers, direct experiences with the harbor are surprisingly rare despite living in a city surrounded by water and being made up of islands. People often experience the waterfront visually but not physically. They may understand the harbor conceptually, but they have never touched an oyster cage, seen marine life beneath the surface, or experienced the scale of the estuary firsthand. Our work is built around changing that relationship.
Students conduct field science along the shoreline. Volunteers build reef structures on Governors Island. Community members participate in shell recycling and restoration programming. Donors, corporate partners, and visitors join boat tours that bring them directly into active restoration sites across the harbor. These experiences transform the harbor from an abstract environmental issue into something tangible and immediate.
Our educational model follows the same philosophy. Students collect water quality data, monitor oysters, observe biodiversity, and engage directly with marine systems surrounding their own city. The harbor becomes their classroom. This matters so much because long-term restoration cannot depend on infrastructure and science alone. It requires public stewardship.
Research consistently shows that people who feel connected to nature are more likely to protect it. Getting more people on the water is our invitation to rebuild that connection in one of the most unlikely places in the world.
Much of environmental storytelling has historically focused on remote landscapes, like distant rainforests, coral reefs, glaciers, or wilderness systems far removed from everyday urban life. But more than half the global population now lives in cities, many of them increasingly vulnerable to flooding, sea level rise, biodiversity loss, and climate pressure. We are part of a growing movement challenging the idea that cities and nature exist separately from one another.
New York Harbor is becoming a prime example of what urban ecological restoration can look like when infrastructure, science, education, and public engagement work together at scale. Oyster reefs will never look like they once did pre colonization. We would be foolish to think we can get back to that place. But today, they are functioning as infrastructure capable of supporting biodiversity, stabilizing shorelines, improving habitat systems, and helping our communities reconnect with the waterways surrounding them.
At the same time, the work asks a larger cultural question: what happens when people begin seeing their own city differently? When we start looking closer in our own backyard, to ultimately, think bigger? For many New Yorkers, the harbor has long felt invisible. Billion Oyster Project’s work is helping make it visible again.
So, if you want to get involved, and be part of the next chapter of New York’s story of recovery and resilience, the number one thing you can do is get on the water.
A thriving reef cluster, building habitat for generations
