> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thereserveeditorial.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Forest Beneath the Ocean - URL: https://www.thereserveeditorial.com/the-forest-beneath-the-ocean/ - Published: 2026-11-09T08:10:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-09T08:10:00.000Z - Description: What is a kelp forest, what happened to them after the marine heat wave, and who is working to bring them back? Two experts walk us through it. - Author: Miriam Carbo Amoros - Tags: Nature & Conservation, Earth “Imagine going to your favorite forest, and then next time you go, it’s just like a grassland. There’s no trees left, and that’s what happened to the kelp forest.” That is how Dan Abbott, who has been diving California’s kelp forests since the 90s, describes what happened to the kelp forests along our coast between 2014 and 2016\. A multi-year marine heat wave that had a huge effect on those ecosystems, completely transforming some of them: areas taken over by sea urchins, where there is still life, but far less than before. Many expected the kelp to bounce back, but it never did. Then, at Tanker’s Reef in Monterey, divers removed the urchins, and within about three years it looked like a full forest again. This is the story of what kelp forests are, what is threatening them, and who is working to bring them back. To tell it, we talked to two experts. We had the chance to interview two people who know these forests extremely well. Jennifer Smith, PhD, is a marine biologist at [Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego,](https://jes013.scrippsprofiles.ucsd.edu/?ref=thereserveeditorial.com) where she leads the Marine Biology Research Division, and her lab studies how kelp forests respond to a warming ocean. Also sharing his knowledge is Dan Abbott, the [Kelp Forest Program](https://www.reefcheck.org/kelp-forest-program/?ref=thereserveeditorial.com) Director at the [Reef Check Foundation](https://www.reefcheck.org/?ref=thereserveeditorial.com), which trains volunteer divers to survey kelp forests along the California coast. Both of them helped us learn and understand a little bit more about what kelp forests are, how they are doing, and what is being done to protect them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c2/a7/c2a71e7e-57fd-4bd4-9b88-9c8e5a850047/content/images/2026/11/unnamed-5.jpg) Jennifer Smith and her team, Scripps Institution of Oceanography As Jennifer explained to us, kelp could be described as large brown seaweeds. Her comparison helps us understand the role they play in the ecosystem: “It’s like a forest on land, like a redwood forest, where instead of woody trees the forest is built by kelp.” And if you ever get the chance to dive or snorkel in one, she describes it this way: “When and if we dive into the kelp forest, the sunlight flickers through the golden color of the kelp blades set against a stunning blue backdrop, creating an incredibly beautiful setting.” Seaweeds like kelp are among the fastest-growing multicellular organisms in the ocean, and they can grow up to 2 ft (about 60 cm) a day in ideal conditions. But what conditions allow kelp forests to thrive along the Pacific? Kelp grows on a rocky ocean bottom, in cold temperate waters, and in nutrient-rich environments that are commonly found along coastlines all around the world. It is commonly found on coastlines that experience upwelling, such as the coasts of the eastern Pacific. There are more or less 120 species of kelp in the world, and giant kelp is one of the most widely distributed: it can be found from Baja California to Alaska, as well as in Chile, Australia, New Zealand, and along the coast of South Africa. > “It’s like a forest on land, like a redwood forest, where instead of woody trees the forest is built by kelp.” Jennifer Smith, Scripps Institution of Oceanography But why do kelp forests matter beyond the animals that live within them? Kelp forests are among the most productive coastal ecosystems on the planet. And you might ask, what does that actually mean? It means they are incredibly important for local fisheries, where they provide habitat, shelter, and food for organisms such as spiny lobster, sea urchins, sheephead, rockfish, and a variety of other marine species that people harvest for food. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c2/a7/c2a71e7e-57fd-4bd4-9b88-9c8e5a850047/content/images/2026/11/unnamed-4.jpg) Jennifer Smith and her team, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Kelp forests also protect the coastline. They are incredibly important for dampening wave action and reducing coastal erosion. Many scientists and resource professionals are trying to figure out what happens when a kelp forest declines, and what determines whether it can recover naturally or needs help. Professor Smith explains that, ultimately, it depends on what is causing the decline and how bad the damage was. Sometimes the cause is heat stress directly, from warmer waters, as we often see in Southern California and San Diego. In that case, recovery might happen naturally, but it may take many years, up to a decade. In other cases, the decline is caused by sea urchin outbreaks due to a loss of urchin predators. Then managing the food web is often the priority, either removing urchins or bringing back their predators. Dan gave us a real example of what this looks like. After the multi-year heat wave of 2014 to 2016, many people in the scientific community expected the kelp to bounce back, because it had already been witnessed in other areas, but it never did. Northern California has lost 95% of its kelp, making it the most affected area of the California coast. Urchins are a native species, so a barren is not an invasion. As Dan explains, urchin barrens are a natural occurrence, similar to a clearing in a forest, but it’s not natural to lose an entire forest. Southern California is a different story. The water is much warmer and much calmer, and urchin predators like the spiny lobster and the sheephead are still abundant, so it hasn’t had the urchin problem to the same extent. The problem Dan points out there is the invasive seaweed *Sargassum horneri*, which is taking over in some areas, like the front side of Catalina Island. Each region has different problems and different causes of decline. Jennifer is clear that the field of kelp forest restoration is truly in its beginnings. Through partnerships with nonprofit organizations like SeaTrees and global academic collaborators, her lab is working to pioneer new and effective approaches for planting kelp in the water, and its research directly informs California’s statewide kelp restoration plan. Dan walked us through a real case of restoration working: Tanker’s Reef, in Monterey. The area started with no kelp, because urchins had completely taken it over, so when Dan and his team of volunteers first dove there, it was devoid of all kelp. Divers went in and removed urchins for about a year, and the following year, kelp started to grow. As Dan explains: “At first, it was just kind of like young kelp or juvenile kelp in that first year, but even that second year we saw a pretty strong response, and then by the third year, it just looked like a full-on kelp forest.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c2/a7/c2a71e7e-57fd-4bd4-9b88-9c8e5a850047/content/images/2026/11/unnamed-2.jpg) Jennifer Smith and her team, Scripps Institution of Oceanography It’s important to keep in mind that it’s not just the number of urchins, but also their behavior. When urchins are well fed, there’s enough kelp. Kelp grows really fast, and when it’s abundant, it flakes off into drift kelp, which are broken-up bits of kelp floating around. Urchins feed off that drift kelp, and they just hunker down, crawling back into a hole and sitting there passively feeding. There are two techniques that restoration efforts like the Reef Check Foundation use: removing the urchins to shore, or crushing them underwater. Which one is used depends on the permits in the area. Tanker’s Reef crushed them underwater. It’s worth mentioning that Reef Check monitored the project but didn’t run it. It was run by a former Reef Check volunteer who got really motivated to do it. > “At first, it was just kind of like young kelp or juvenile kelp in that first year, but even that second year we saw a pretty strong response, and then by the third year, it just looked like a full-on kelp forest.” Dan Abbott, Reef Check Foundation According to Dan, if you restore the balance of predators and control the urchin population, there is a very strong potential to bring these ecosystems back. The difficult part is scaling it up, making it extend for many miles instead of just a couple of kilometers (roughly a mile). How do we know whether a kelp forest is recovering or declining? Someone has to count. That is the job of the Reef Check Foundation’s volunteer divers. According to Reef Check, its kelp program is the largest scuba-based citizen science monitoring effort on the West Coast. We asked Dan how they do it. “We usually have12 to 16 divers going out and doing a dive. Each buddy team, pair of divers, is given a particular assignment to go in one area and lay down a transect.” A transect is a measured line the divers count along. As Dan explains: “So the data that we collect is density-based, meaning that we are counting organisms over a certain area as opposed to just roaming around and counting what you see. We’re actually laying down, say, a 30-meter (about 100 ft) transect, counting a meter on either side of that.” They count about 80 species, from kelp and fish to sea stars and abalone, and they also record whether the bottom is sand or rock. One transect takes around half an hour underwater, and at each site they do five more, plus twelve fish-only transects, because fish need more ground covered to get accurate numbers. These are not beginner divers. Volunteers go through a five-week course that ends with six dives over two or three days, where they are evaluated to see if their numbers are good enough to be used as data. Every volunteer also does a one-day training at the start of every season, every single year. So why volunteers? Dan says it is more economical, but that is not the main reason: “I think the real reason is because we’re getting the community involved in these ecosystems in a way that they wouldn’t be otherwise.” Their volunteers include lawyers, software engineers, and people who always loved the ocean but were not able to pursue it as a career. You might have read that kelp is often discussed as a climate solution, because it is thought to have a role in absorbing and storing carbon. Jennifer helps us understand why: kelp is one of the most productive species in the ocean, and it can photosynthesize very rapidly, fixing carbon into new tissue. That makes it an easy target for being considered a form of blue carbon, which is carbon that ocean ecosystems take out of the atmosphere and lock away. But in order for any organism to be considered sequestered carbon, scientists and specialists need to prove that the carbon that was fixed (locked away) does not get remineralized and released again into the atmosphere over the course of a century. That is a very difficult thing to prove. A large amount of kelp biomass ends up on the beach, where it decomposes and releases carbon back into the air and atmosphere, so that part would not count as sequestration. Carbon movement into and out of kelp forests is complex, and there is still no standardized set of methods to verify carbon offsets in these processes. Dan adds another way to look at it. Kelp definitely takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and binds it up in its tissues. The open question is what happens to that tissue and what percentage of it goes offshore and sinks. But even if none of the CO2 is stored, he explains, carbon is cycling through the kelp, so there is a lot of carbon locked up in it. If kelp disappears, he puts it simply: the carbon that was in the kelp ends up in the atmosphere, because the kelp is no longer growing. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/c2/a7/c2a71e7e-57fd-4bd4-9b88-9c8e5a850047/content/images/2026/11/unnamed-3.jpg) Jennifer Smith and her team, Scripps Institution of Oceanography The Reserve Editorial is based in San Clemente, not far from where Jennifer and her team work, so when she explains that this year’s super El Niño sits on our front steps, we can relate. Dan helps us understand why it matters: kelp’s tolerance to temperature is about 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius). As he points out, this November the water in Monterey, California sits at around 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.6°C), which is very unusual, and it has been much warmer in San Diego, at 71 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit (21.7–22.2°C). Understandably, we don’t know what is going to happen. Even experts can’t predict the future, and they will have to keep monitoring without making any guesses. This is where Jennifer’s work gives some hope. Her team has found remarkable variation in how different kelp species respond to thermal stress, including strong heat resilience in understory kelps like feather boa and southern sea palm. They are also finding variation within giant kelp, the most abundant species, and hope to use it in restoration efforts that boost heat tolerance in local populations. Right now, Jennifer and her team are rapidly trying to collect, biobank (store safely), and characterize (study) kelp that has not yet collapsed due to warming. These “super kelps,” she explains, can help ensure giant kelp persists throughout the rest of the state through selective breeding in in-water restoration efforts. In the end, she says, it may be these individuals who hold the secret for future persistence under a changing climate. If you are wondering how to help protect kelp forests, Jennifer’s advice is simple: get in the water and see them for yourself. As she says to all of us: “Experiencing these ecosystems firsthand will give us an immediate sense of awe and curiosity. When people have a personal connection to these ecosystems, it helps increase the awareness and the desire to better protect and manage them.” Once we see it with our own eyes, we start caring and maybe take some action, and we are then encouraged to help and support these actions in the best way we can. From the surface, Dan says, kelp might look like a brown mat of algae, not really appealing. But as he describes it: “When you put your head under the water and put a mask on, it’s one of the most incredible and productive ecosystems imaginable.” > “When people have a personal connection to these ecosystems, it helps increase the awareness and the desire to better protect and manage them.” Jennifer Smith, Scripps Institution of Oceanography We also asked both of them what people most misunderstand about kelp forests. Dan told us that many people believe sea otters will eat all the urchins. They do eat urchins, but they don’t tend to eat the ones in barrens. They eat the ones in the kelp forest, which is good for the forest, but it doesn’t help turn an urchin barren back into a kelp forest, and that is part of the reason why these ecosystems have been so stable. Jennifer pointed to something many of us have felt on the beach: kelp washed ashore can be creepy, and the smell of rotting seaweed can be offensive. But we have to keep in mind that kelp forest ecosystems are really one of the most remarkable places on Earth. She finishes the thought with our favorite quote: “Sometimes what lies below the ocean’s surface can be scary, but these ecosystems offer a window into a beautiful, thriving, and incredibly important part of California’s identity.” We give thanks to both of these extraordinary people for participating and helping us understand the world of kelp and its forest beneath the Pacific. Thanks to experts like them, we can understand not only what kelp is but also what actions their organizations are taking to make sure the species survives and keeps thriving in Pacific waters. So, what can you do? Start by going to see it. If you live near the coast, get in the water with a mask and snorkel (with a buddy, and after checking local conditions) and look at the kelp from underneath. If you want to do more, the Reef Check Foundation has a few ways to get involved: you can become a member, join its Adopt-A-Reef program, or, if you are a certified diver, train to become a volunteer surveyor. And if you love the ocean but have never been able to dive, look at its Dive into Science scholarships, which offer scuba training, mentorship, and a Citizen Scientist certification. You do not need a science degree to care about kelp forests. Have you ever seen a kelp forest, from the beach or under the water? We would love to hear about it. Thank you for being here and for reading! We will keep sharing with you. Remember, if you would like to contribute content to this editorial, simply get in touch at [thereserveeditorial@gmail.com](mailto:thereserveeditorial@gmail.com).