LEONARDTOWN, Md. – Students at the Dr. James A. Forrest Career and Technology Center in Leonardtown are taking the low-cost, automated Bay Observation Box (BOB) monitoring system they helped develop and applying it in a new way: to support classroom oyster aquaculture and explore its potential role in Chesapeake Bay restoration. The project earned fifth place at the SkillsUSA National Championships recently.
The BOB project began four years ago as a collaboration between St. Mary’s River Watershed Association (SMRWA) volunteers and Dorothy Birch’s Natural Resource Management (NRM) students in an effort to improve limited water-quality monitoring throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed (https://bit.ly/BOBsWebsite).
That work soon expanded to include other classes, including students in Engineering, Graphic Communications and the IT Networking Academy.
With the help of several grants, volunteers and students have built 22 automated monitoring kits so far at a cost of about $1,100 each and deployed them at various times in watersheds from the St. Mary’s River to St. Clement’s Bay. Comparable commercial systems typically cost more than $20,000 and sometimes exceed $60,000.
To date, the team has collected and made publicly available millions of data points, measuring air and water temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, pH and electrical conductivity.
Two years ago, NRM students Ryder Pobst, Megan Shepherd and Anna Biggs expanded the project’s focus into oyster restoration, placing 17 oysters in the school’s 500-gallon aquaculture tank and keeping them alive for months by feeding them algae, against all expectations. A BOB provided data used to adjust water parameters.
Emma Green Ewing, SMRWA’s executive director, noted, “I was shocked and delighted by their success. It’s not easy to grow oysters in tanks that do not have a continuous supply of Bay water flowing through them.”
Those efforts won the students a silver medal at the 2025 SkillsUSA Maryland State Championship.
The following school year, Pobst continued the project with the help of NRM students Armirah Gonzales and Abigail Aina. Shepherd continued to volunteer her support post-graduation as the team placed more than 2,000 oyster spat in two algae-fed tanks: one with a complex ecosystem designed to mimic Bay conditions and the other with only water kept at ideal parameters for oyster growth.
Six months later, 1,449 of those spat remained alive, with 11.5% of the idealized tank spat and 3.1% of the complex ecosystem spat showing significant growth.
“Saving Our Waters with Oysters” took fifth place in Career Pathways: Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources at the SkillsUSA National Championships held in Atlanta in early June.
Natural Resource Management teacher Dorothy Birch noted, “Every year, this project dramatically enhances student learning by giving students real-world problems to solve in an investigation that engages and excites them.”
Aina said, “I enjoyed learning about how the BOB was made. It inspired me to make my own products that are environmentally sustainable and helpful.”
For her own capstone project, Aina created a zero-waste soap and candle product entirely from invasive plants. She used English ivy to make a liquid soap that she placed in a wax container made from a bamboo mold. After using the soap, the consumer melts the lid in the microwave to refill the container as a candle that burns completely away.
Green Ewing added, “The BOBs project starts with water quality monitoring, but it combines so many aspects of our work, teaching people about our waterways and training the next generation of Chesapeake Bay leaders.”
To learn more, visit https://smrwa.org/programs/bobs-project/. You can donate to this and other projects by the St. Mary’s River Watershed Association at https://smrwa.org/donate/.
This project has been supported through four Chesapeake Bay Trust Youth Environmental Education grants and three Oyster Innovation Award grants funded by the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance and Chesapeake Bay Foundation.