Why kelp is important

Kelp grows incredibly fast up to two feet per day and exports a large portion of its biomass into the deep sea, allowing it to permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Coastal ecosystems sequester surprisingly large amounts of carbon, up to 20 times more per acre than land forests , according to a report by Harvard University. Marine plants that contribute to this carbon sequestration, such as mangroves and seagrass, live in rich soil.

The Wildlife Trusts , an organisation made up of conservation charities, emphasises the importance of preserving kelp forests. They play a hugely important role in the carbon cycle of our planet, capturing 75 per cent of the net carbon fixed annually in the sea. Kelp also reduces coastal erosion by serving as a buffer against strong waves. Losing our kelp forests would cause a ripple effect, impacting the many species that depend on them, says the organisation.

Without them the type and abundance of species in the community would be totally different. Sea urchins are like vacuum cleaners of the ocean floor.

They help to clean up any kelp that has fallen to the sea floor. However, sea urchins also love to eat the holdfasts of kelp. Since sea otters feed on sea urchins, they help to keep the sea urchin populations in balance and in return help to maintain a healthy kelp forest ecosystem.

Sadly, after the sea otters were hunted to near extinction in California by the s, the sea urchin population exploded because they were no longer being preyed on. In certain areas, where a once healthy kelp forest existed, now lies an underwater desert called an urchin barren. These urchin barrens contain low biodiversity, because the kelp forests that once provided important habitat are now nonexistent. However, due to the ban of sea otter hunting in the U. Air Bladder : The balloon like structure that is attached to the blades of the kelp to keep the kelp buoyant so it can gather more sunlight.

Because sea urchins are a tasty snack for sea otters, they keep them under control which subsequently maintains the vitality of kelp forests. In the 19 th century, sea otter populations in the Pacific Northwest were nearly wiped out as a result of the fur trade.

Between and , 89 sea otters were reintroduced along the BC coast. Since they were protected under the Species at Risk Act SARA , their population ballooned to roughly causing kelp forests to grow twenty-fold. This presented many benefits for British Columbia.

Carbon storage has also increased while the otter tourist industry has blown up, according to CBC. However, there are projects working to restore ecological, social, and economic balance.

While carbon capture technology receives a lot of attention, nature-based climate solutions offer many opportunities. As explained by Dr. While forests get a lot of attention when it comes to capturing carbon, coastal ecosystems have an incredible capacity to mitigate the effects of climate change. This natural system is called blue carbon.

Carbon sequestration processes also occur in cold-water kelp forests. Generally speaking, kelps live further from the tropics than coral reefs , mangrove forests , and warm-water seagrass beds , so kelp forests do not overlap with those systems. Like those systems, though, kelp forests provide important three-dimensional, underwater habitat that is home to hundreds or thousands of species of invertebrates, fishes, and other algae. Some species aggregate and spawn in kelp forests or utilize these areas as juvenile nursery habitat.

Large predatory species of sharks and marine mammals are known to hunt in the long corridors that form in kelp forests between rows of individual plants. Though kelp forests are important ecosystems wherever they occur, they are more dynamic than the other systems mentioned above. In other words, they can disappear and reappear based on the oceanographic conditions and the population sizes of their primary herbivores.

Warmer than normal summers and seasonal changes to currents that bring fewer nutrients to kelp forests both sometimes occurring naturally combine to weaken kelps and threaten their survival in some years.

Strong individual storms can wipe out large areas of kelp forest, by ripping the kelp plants from the seafloor.