A team of UGA researchers has joined forces with several universities and organizations around the globe to monitor and document the northward migration of kelp forests and the effects this migration has within their ecosystem. These partners hope their latest paper, which was published in Global Change Biology, will highlight the importance of international partnerships when it comes to accurately documenting ecosystem-level research.
“Thanks to a standard monitoring program that spans oceans, years and many collaborative efforts, we could look at an entire system and gain unique insights,” said C. Brock Woodson, associate professor in the College of Engineering and a senior author in the study. “If we had studied just individual areas, we never would’ve been able to draw the same conclusions about how kelp forests are changing.”
Created in 1999, the initial monitoring program was developed by the Partnership for the Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans in Oregon and California. See a full list of participating partners for the kelp migration project.
