Historical oyster habitat and fisheries in English coastal waters

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Methods – Archival searches: Government archives, scientific and public libraries were searched for written resources that provided evidence of past native oyster fisheries and/or mention of oyster habitats. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on travel during the course of the project, the majority of resources were sourced from online archives. These included digitised government publications of Select Committees and Royal Commission reports and minutes of evidence and annual fishery statistics (available at: https://parlipapers.proquest.com/parlipapers), and digitised popular books (available at: https://books.google.co.uk). Online searches were conducted in December 2020, using the key words ‘native oyster’ and ‘Ostrea edulis’. Articles were listed by relevance and titles/descriptions of the first 500 articles in each database were searched. To focus on historical oyster habitat, the searches were restricted to sources published prior to 1930. Online resources were supplemented by the personal collections and archival searches conducted previously by the two authors, including dedicated searches of collections housed at the British Library, the National Archives, the National Maritime Museum, Cambridge University Library, the Marine Biological Association, the British Newspaper Archive, and Record Offices and county archives across England between 2008 and 2011. Any publication that focused, or was deemed likely to mention historical oyster habitat or oyster fisheries around England (i.e., with a focus upon marine ecosystems, or human activities in the marine environment), was read in full. These included publications such as the minutes of Royal Commissions seeking evidence about the impacts of trawling, naturalist accounts of coastal environments, newspaper reports, and maritime charts, as well as literature directly related to the oyster fishery. Data extracted: Mentions or descriptions of oyster habitats and fisheries were extracted into a MS Excel database. For each mention as much of the following data were included as was available: year referred to, location of catch (as precisely as possible including the name of the oyster habitat or nearest port if provided), whether the beds were discussed as natural or stocked, qualitative descriptions of the location and depth, habitat and/or fishery (e.g., total numbers of oysters extracted, whether in decline or doing well, or final year of the fishery if it was no longer exploited). Please see the associated summary report for further information.