Beagle kelp maps from: One of the least disturbed marine coastal ecosystems on Earth: Spatial and temporal persistence of Darwin’s sub-Antarctic giant kelp forests

Aim: Marine habitats and their dynamics are difficult to systematically monitor, particularly those in remote locations. This is the case with the sub-Antarctic ecosystem of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, which was already noted by Charles Darwin in his accounts on the Voyage of the Beagle and recorded on the nautical charts made during that expedition. We combined these and other nautical charts from the 19th and early 20th centuries with surveys conducted in the 1970s and 1980s and satellite detection algorithms from 1984 to 2019, to analyse kelp distribution through time and the factors that correlate with it.

Location: Marine ecoregions of Channels and Fjords of Southern Chile, Falkland Islands (Malvinas), and the island of South Georgia.

Taxon: Macrocystis pyrifera.

Methods: We characterised 309 giant kelp forests by their coastal geospatial attributes. Statistically significant variables were included in a conditional inference tree to predict kelp forest ...