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Taking the Pulse of Underwater Forests

A new study from UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis finds kelps are doing better than other key coastal ecosystem-forming species Like all marine ecosystems around the world, kelp forests are threatened by human activities. However, a new study reports that kelp ecosystems are in fact faring relatively well in the face of those dangers. A working group from UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis collected nearly all of the existing kelp-monitoring data sets from around the world and analyzed them to identify long-term trends. The researchers, including UCSB marine ecologists Jennifer Caselle and Daniel Reed sought to determine whether kelp forests  like corals, sea grasses and other key coastal ecosystem-forming species  are in decline. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “We were surprised to discover that while one-third of the kelp regions for which we had data are in de