Steve Patterson, with the oyster gardening program, left, and volunteers empty a bag of oysters to be counted off the shore of Roger Williams University, in Bristol.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

BRISTOL — A Roger Williams University program helping to revive Rhode Island’s once-thriving shellfishing business will get a boost from a $1-million federal economic development grant, officials said Tuesday.

The grant will go to the university’s Center for Economic and Environmental Development, which has been raising oysters and working with the shellfishing industry to reestablish oystering. The Commerce Department said the grant will create jobs and strengthen the state’s economy.

Timothy Scott, a professor of environmental science and director of the center, said the grant will go largely to buy equipment to renovate the program’s nursery for growing shellfish, which has been devoted mostly to oysters. The equipment will include the basic plumbing for a shellfish nursery, he said, such as piping and pumps to take water from the Bay and circulate it through the facility.

He said the nursery can now grow 10 million “seed,” or baby oysters, per year, and plans are to expand it substantially.

Although Scott said he hopes to branch out to include other shellfish, the project has so far focused on oysters. With the help of numerous volunteers, the tiny seed oysters grown in the nursery at the university are transplanted, first to cages to protect them from predators while they grow bigger, and then to the bottom of the Bay to reestablish its oyster beds.

Rhode Island’s oyster population suffered a devastating decline beginning with the early 1900s because of polluted water, over-harvesting and natural disease. That decline was so severe, Scott said, that now “there is no commercially viable oyster population in Narragansett Bay.”

“We think there is a potential for the return of that industry,” he said. One element of the project, he said, is breeding disease-resistant oysters.

Dale Leavitt, an assistant professor of marine biology at the university, said the grant will be “a huge help for getting the new hatchery up and running and improving the program.”

The program’s goals are both economic development, through expanding and strengthening the shellfishing industry, and improving water quality in the Bay, through oysters’ and clams’ ability to filter water as they feed. Scott said that eventually, perhaps during the next decade, the industry could produce 250 new jobs.

blandis@projo.com