In the coastal waters off British Columbia, tribal volunteers from the Haida Nation dive for purple sea urchins amid a dense forest of rippling golden-brown kelp fronds in efforts help with conserving kelp forests. Sunlight filters through the canopy, creating a mesmerizing dance of light and shadow, as rays and sea lions wend through the kelp maze, sharks glide past, and bright orange garibaldis dash between the swaying fronds.

Kelp forests are biodiversity hotspots teeming with a colorful variety of seaweeds, sponges, crustaceans, and other small ocean animals, many of them found nowhere else. At one time, vast kelp beds grew in nutrient-rich shallow waters along roughly a third of the world’s coastlines, where they helped to reduce the strength of waves, minimized coastal erosion, and provided shelter to fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals, demonstrating the importance of conserving kelp forests.

Today, however, many kelp forests are on life support, victims of water pollution from terrestrial agriculture and coastal development, bottom trawling for fish, and an explosion of kelp-devouring urchins, like those the Haida volunteers are collecting as part of an eradication program. But perhaps the most important driver of kelp decline is the rapid warming of the ocean, showing the urgency of conserving kelp forests.

Kelp forests are vanishing twice as fast as coral reefs and four times faster than tropical rainforests.

Healthy kelp forests need cool, nutrient-rich seawater to survive. As ocean waters warm, kelp can no longer inhabit parts of their former range. The crisis is escalating quickly. Kelp forests are vanishing twice as fast as coral reefs and four times faster than tropical rainforests. An estimated 40 percent to 60 percent of kelp forests worldwide have been lost or significantly degraded in the last 50 years. These precipitous declines typically received far less scientific scrutiny than higher-profile ecological crises than conserving kelp forests. But kelp has gradually been getting more attention as scientists and the environmental community come to recognize the value of the carbon that coastal ecosystems, including kelp forests, can capture.

Read the full article about conserving kelp forests by Richard Schiffman at Yale Environment 360.