Water

2023

The Kelp Keepers

As kelp forests collapse along the Pacific Coast, citizen scientists converge on Port Orford to study and protect what remains.

The Kelp Keepers

Water

2023

As kelp forests collapse along the Pacific Coast, citizen scientists converge on Port Orford to study and protect what remains.

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By Anna Lueck

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Along the Oregon Coast, between weathered beach towns and rolling sand dunes, stand miles and miles of forest. Creaking gently in the wind, these cedars and pines shield small mammals, birds, and amphibians from severe storms; the trees’ needles fall to the ground, becoming food for woodland creatures and, later, for microorganisms that turn detritus into compost. As they photosynthesize, the trees continuously release oxygen into the crisp, clear air. This is a functioning ecosystem, one that could not exist without the shelter and food offered by the trees.

Just past the treeline and below the lapping waves of the Pacific Ocean is another forest; one of Nereocystis luetkeana, more commonly known as bull kelp. Unlike a pine tree, kelp is not a plant, but a protist, or multicellular algae. Commonly seen as yellow-brown strands washed up on the beach, we don’t usually understand kelp as a forest, but if we could stand on the ocean floor and look up, the comparison would be clear. As trees filter the air, kelp filters the water, turning minerals, nutrients, and carbon from the sea into rich food for fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals. Kelp forests also provide refuge to these same animals, who hide from predators and even spawn their young between its fronds. There is life at every level of a kelp forest—or at least, there should be.

There’s another way kelp forests resemble our forests on land: they’re stressed. Just as fire, logging, and disease have consumed terrestrial forests, heatwaves, predator loss, and surging urchin populations have destabilized kelp forests up and down North America’s Pacific coastline. In Northern California, a 2021 aerial survey found that over 90% of the region’s bull kelp forests had disappeared in the preceding 5 years. But while we see the first signs of this unsettling pattern traveling north to our Oregon shores, we also see glimmers of hope. Not all our forests are gone, or even in poor health. Frequently, healthy forests appear alongside decimated ones. If we want to help kelp forests thrive, we need to understand why this patchy disappearance is happening and determine how we can help—and soon. With a ticking clock and ever-growing list of questions, that’s exactly what a broad coalition of Oregonians is setting out to do.

To learn more about kelp surveying in Oregon, check out:

Oregon kelp alliance

Reef check database

Kelp watch

SOURCES

Featured

Interview with Dave Lacey in Port Orford, OR. Conducted March 21, 2023. Contact: dave@southcoasttours.net

Interview with Diana Hollingshead in Winchester Bay, OR. Conducted April 7, 2023. Contact: dhollingshead@reefcheck.org

McPherson, M.L., Finger, D.J.I., Houskeeper, H.F. et al. Large-scale shift in the structure of a kelp forest ecosystem co-occurs with an epizootic and marine heatwave. Commun Biol 4, 298 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-01827-6

More information on funding received by ORKA: Merkley Secures Funding for Scientific Research, Public Safety in Appropriations Committee Bill

Oregon Kelp Alliance

Other helpful sources

Additional members of Oregon Kelp Alliance:

Tom Calvanese, Station Manager of Port Orford Field Station Office: tom.calvanese@oregonstate.edu
Sara Hamilton, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Bodega Marine Lab, University of California, Davis: sahamilton@ucdavis.edu
Sarah Gravem, Research Associate in the Department of Integrative Biology, Oregon State University: gravems@oregonstate.edu

Seaweed Chronicles by Susan Hand Shetterly (book)

Patterns of loss and persistence in kelp forests

Washington Seaweed Symposium, December 8 2022. Recordings available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe0piKVi4aU&list=PLpZeSH7XVl0z8HUT_5UlqeB7SA2EK73oR