Guides to the world’s kelp coastlines — the Great Southern Reef, Monterey Bay, Hokkaido, Norway, Patagonia — their ecology, seasons and stories.
257 articles · Browse the Coastal Atlas map →
Tasmania lost around 95 percent of its giant kelp forests in decades. Here's the science of the collapse, the urchin invasion — and the restoration race to bring it back.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Barkley Sound, Clayoquot Sound and the full weight of the open Pacific: how Vancouver Island's west coast became Canada's kelp laboratory and its best cold-water wild coast.
Tom Okafor ·
Eroded volcano harbours, Hector's dolphins, bull kelp and pāua reefs: a field guide to Banks Peninsula and Akaroa, Canterbury's wild maritime backyard.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
A coastal atlas guide to the kelp coasts of Asturias in northern Spain — cool Cantabrian water, barnacle-gathering cliffs, and the southern edge of Europe's kelp.
Dr. Elias Brandt ·
Cook Inlet is Alaska's great tidal estuary — bore tides, glacial silt, belugas and salmon, with rich cold-water kelp beds in its clear pockets. A Coastal Atlas guide.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Goat Island — Cape Rodney–Okakari Point — was New Zealand's first marine reserve and remains its finest shore dive: big snapper, crayfish and golden kelp in five metres.
Tom Okafor ·
Dorset's Jurassic Coast is a 150-million-year rock record with kelp forests laid over it — Kimmeridge ledges, Lulworth reefs, Lyme Bay and how to dive them.
Tom Okafor ·
A Coastal Atlas guide to Hood Canal: the Salish Sea's natural fjord, its famous shore dives, giant Pacific octopus, bull kelp shallows and breathless depths.
Tom Okafor ·
West of Brittany, the Iroise Sea holds Europe's biggest kelp beds under some of its fiercest tides — inside a marine park the working coast helped build.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Montenegro's short, mountainous coast holds the Adriatic's southern Cystoseira canopies — drowned-karst bays, rising urchin pressure, and its first young marine parks.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
On the Avalon Peninsula, the Labrador Current delivers icebergs, capelin and cold green water to some of North America's richest — and least visited — kelp forests.
Tom Okafor ·
A Coastal Atlas field guide to Point Reyes' headland kelp beds — cape oceanography, the annual bull kelp cycle, and the best ways to see it.
Tom Okafor ·
Inside the subantarctic kelp forests of the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego: cold clear water, drifting kelp highways, and science at the southern frontier.
Dr. Elias Brandt ·
A Coastal Atlas field guide to the Aleutians — the Pacific's most remote great kelp forest, its weather, its war, and how to get there.
Jack Callum ·
Nine volcanic islands mid-ocean grow deep gardens of golden Laminaria ochroleuca kelp. A guide to the Azores' forests, crossroads fauna and diving.
Tom Okafor ·
Explore Chile's Humboldt Current coast: relentless upwelling, Lessonia and giant kelp beds, the cochayuyo harvest tradition, and the pressures reshaping 4,000 km of reef.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
San Carlos Beach is California's easiest first kelp dive. A practical planner: when to go, where to gear up, and a step-by-step circuit under the canopy.
Tom Okafor ·
A guide to the Gaspé Peninsula's kelp coast: cold green water, capelin runs on the beaches, the gannet cliffs of Percé, and the kelp forests of the St Lawrence.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
A coastal atlas guide to the Baltic Sea, where salinity drops below what most kelp can survive and bladderwrack forests rule a brackish inland sea.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Guide to the Cape Peninsula's kelp forests: two oceans, sea bamboo, seals and sharks, freediving culture, and how a warming world is shifting the reefs.
Tom Okafor ·
Where cold northern and warm southern currents collide, the Channel Islands grow California's grandest kelp forests — protected by national park and marine reserves.
Sofia Andersson ·
Foveaux Strait runs shallow and fast between the South Island and Rakiura — a coastal atlas guide to its bull kelp reefs, Bluff oysters, great whites and shipwreck coast.
Tom Okafor ·
The Kattegat stacks brackish Baltic water over Skagerrak salt — a shallow sea where kelp forests grow, thin and vanish along a European salinity gradient.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Dunedin's doorstep grows forests of giant kelp and southern bull kelp, patrolled by sea lions and hoiho penguins. A guide to Otago's cold southern reefs.
Tom Okafor ·