Most of us only see kelp when it’s washed up on beaches, where it tends to look slimy and unimpressive. But it’s one of the great unsung organisms of our oceans. Kelp creates critical, foundational habitats for everything from sea snails and rockfish to sea lions and gray whales, and it’s of great cultural importance to Indigenous peoples on North America’s Pacific coast.
Kelp is also a key ingredient in foods, pharmaceuticals, and other products, including fertilizer and even ice cream.
Globally, however, kelp forests are in trouble. In some parts of British Columbia, 40 percent of kelp beds have been wiped out, and Northern California has lost as much as 96 percent of its kelp beds.
To protect kelp, we need to know which species are located where and how abundant or sparse they are. Reliably mapping and monitoring kelp beds is vital to guiding restoration and conservation policies.
In recognition of kelp’s vital importance to coastal ecosystems, in October 2023, the Hakai Institute and The Nature Conservancy launched the first-of-its-kind kelp mapping guidebook, Mapping Canopy-Forming Kelps in the Northeast Pacific: A Guidebook for Decision Makers and Practitioners, to help users from all backgrounds apply advanced mapping techniques to monitor kelp resources in their respective regions.
The Hakai Institute and The Nature Conservancy have more than a decade of experience with kelp mapping and monitoring projects and long-standing relationships with experts throughout the Northeast Pacific—including kelp aquaculture and conservation groups and Indigenous guardian and stewardship programs—and are part of a growing international community of practice.
“The kelp mapping project is part of our urgent mandate to accelerate solutions to ocean issues,” says Rebecca Martone, the executive director of the Ocean Decade Regional Collaborative Center for the Northeast Pacific and a contributing author to the guidebook. “We couldn’t be more proud of our partners and collaborators who helped us make it happen.”
The guide, an endorsed United Nations Ocean Decade Action, combines the knowledge of 50 experts from Alaska down to the Baja California peninsula—and outlines tangible steps for practitioners to determine the appropriate tools to select based on the distribution of kelp in a specific area.
“It is my hope that this guidebook can not only help us better understand kelp dynamics and help inform conservation, restoration, and management of kelp forests,” says Luba Reshitnyk, a geospatial scientist at the Hakai Institute and a lead researcher on the project, “but also be publicly accessible and scalable to other projects beyond kelp.”
