Monitoring and Evaluation of Kelp Forest Ecosystems in the MLPA Marine Protected Area Network

The kelp forest monitoring datasets provided here are assembled from four academic institutions involved in the baseline and long-term monitoring phases of California’s statewide Marine Protection Area implementation and evaluation process. These datasets include the baseline periods for all regions, and additional historical data. The Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) kelp forest program, administered out of the University of California campuses in Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara and funded primarily by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, has been monitoring across California since 1999, and with a focus on Marine Protected Areas. The Vantuna Research Group at Occidental College has conducted monitoring in the southern California region since 1966, and has been using similar sampling methods to the PISCO program to monitor kelp forests in the region since the 2004 wide-scale monitoring effort of the Cooperative Research and Assessment of Nearshore Ecosystems (CRANE) Program. Researchers at Humboldt State University began monitoring sites in the north coast region in 2014 and 2015 using the PISCO sampling methodology. Data have been integrated across all four programs. To comprehensively and quantitatively characterize the ecological community and geological features at each kelp forest site, four different sampling methods are employed, all of which are conducted visually by SCUBA divers. Fish transects and benthic macroalgae and invertebrate transects overlap with, but are spatially distinct from one another. Surveys are conducted annually, during the summer or early fall. Typically, two to four sites inside a given MPA and two to four sites outside of the MPA are surveyed in a given year, with the number and shape of sites varying depending on habitat (e.g. onshore-offshore steepness of the reef) and longshore width of the MPA. Sampling history varies by program, MPA, and sampling site.