Discover floating forests!

Welcome to Floating Forests, where you can help us uncover the history of Giant Kelp forests around the globe. Most life on the seafloor can only be sampled by SCUBA divers or dredging up samples from the deep. This kind of data requires a ton of (really fun) effort to collect, but it means we’re limited to places we can get to! Given the worldwide distribution of kelp, scientists need your help to track it across time and space.

Giant kelp forests are one of the most exciting ecosystems on earth! Kelp is what we call a ‘foundation species’. In ecosystems where it is present (roughly 25% of the world’s coastlines!) it forms the foundation of the entire ecosystem. It provides food for all manner of herbivores from tiny shrimp to ravenous sea urchins to grazing fish.

You’ll view photographs taken from satellites, but these satellites were not designed to be able to see kelp. Kelp’s reflectance signature (the color of light that it reflects) is just at the edge of the camera’s detection abilities. Because of this, kelp and something as simple as the glint of sun off of a wave look the same to a computer. But to a person, the shapes and patterns of kelp forests are fairly obvious. That’s where you come in! By tracing patches of kelp, you can do a far more accurate job than a computer, helping to process this mountain of data!