Dr. Tom Bell2, Dr. Kyle Cavanaugh3, Ms Vienna Saccomanno1, Kate Cavanaugh3, Dr. Henry Housekeeper3, Norah Eddy1, Falk Schuetzenmeister1, Nathaniel Rindlaub1, Mary Gleason1
1The Nature Conservancy, , USA, 2Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution , , USA, 3University of California, Los Angeles, , USA
Giant kelp and bull kelp forests are increasingly at risk from a range of stressors including marine heatwave events and herbivore outbreaks. Understanding the spatial and temporal dynamics of kelp loss and recovery is important for implementing strategic restoration and management efforts. The floating canopy of these kelps is well-suited to study via satellite imagery from Landsat, which provides high temporal and moderate spatial resolution data of floating kelp canopy. As the world’s largest record of kelp canopy dynamics in both time and space, Landsat imagery offers users the rare opportunity to attempt to distinguish the impacts of climate change on kelp abundance, which is an important management challenge that requires long-term (>30 years) time series data at broad spatial scales in order to separate climate-related trends from other sources of variability. However, the size and complexity of the satellite image dataset has made ecological analysis difficult for scientists and managers. To increase the accessibility of this dataset, our team created Kelpwatch.org, a web-based and open-access visualization and analysis tool. Here, we demonstrate how Kelpwatch.org can be used to analyze long-term trends in kelp canopy across regions, quantify spatial variability in the response to record-breaking marine heatwave events, and provide an analysis of kelp canopy status around the Monterey Peninsula, California USA. Kelpwatch.org provides near real-time spatial data on a platform that makes complex earth observation data actionable for scientists and managers, which can help identify areas for strategic and data-driven kelp research, monitoring, and management efforts.
Presentation Slides – Vienna Saccomanno
