Banner Year for Kelp Forest Monitoring

This year, Reef Check’s kelp forest monitoring program went through its largest expansion since its inception in 2006. In 2022, we expanded our monitoring network to almost 160 sites and completed over 180 surveys spanning a geographic range of almost 25 degrees of latitude. Monitoring expanded into Washington State and Baja, Mexico. In Washington, we hired a regional manager, Jackie Selbitschka, and trained over 50 new volunteers. They surveyed 30 sites in Puget Sound using our new Washington monitoring protocol. In Baja, Mexico we surveyed seven new sites spanning from the southern edge of kelp forests in Magdalena Bay to Ensenada in the north. Our Oregon program grew from three to ten monitoring sites in support of kelp restoration efforts and in California we monitored over 100 sites to add another year of data to our 17-year long time series of kelp forest monitoring data.