U.S. National Park Service Kelp Monitoring Database

NCEAS Project, "7600: Halpern: Implications for reserve design (Hosted by NCEAS)", and a paper titled, "Supporting Online Material for Strong Top-down control in Southern California Kelp Forest Ecosystems" used this MS Access database. The U.S. National Park Service has been conducting annual surveys of algal, invertebrate, and fish abundances at 16 different kelp forest sites around the five islands in the Channel Islands National Park since 1982 as part of the Kelp Forest Monitoring Program (KFMP). Here we focused on data from the KFMP for only four years, 1999-2002 (for our purposes, a year runs from July the previous year to June of the current year), as these were the only years for which oceanographic data were available, and only for the 4 northern Channel Islands. Abundance data were available for 49 species, with trophic classifications of these species as elsewhere.
For information on how this data set was used please see, Supporting Online Material for Strong Top-down control in Southern California Kelp Forest Ecosystems, Benjamin S. Halpern, Karl Cottenie, Bernardo R. Broitman, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/312/5777/1230/DC1, Accessed 30 May 2006 and Published 26 May 2006, Science 312, 1230 (2006) DOI: 10.1126/science.1128613.