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.