Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Abalone Back in the Quadrats
Seven years after seeding began on Tasmania's Lumeriah Coast, juvenile blacklip abalone are turning up in the monitoring quadrats again. Here's why that matters.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
#kelp-restoration
27 articles
Blue Carbon8 min read
Financing Coastal Adaptation with Nature: Where Kelp Restoration Fits
Adaptation finance has no tonne to sell — so how does ocean nature pay? The instruments, metrics and cases for kelp restoration as bankable adaptation.
Priya Raman ·
Blue Carbon10 min read
Setting a Baseline: The Number Every Kelp Carbon Project Starts From
A carbon credit is only real if the baseline against which it's measured is honest. How baselines are set for kelp and blue carbon projects — and why they decide integrity.
Priya Raman ·
Science11 min read
How Scientists Measure Kelp Forest Resilience — The Indicators That Predict Recovery
Recruitment, grazer pressure, genetic diversity, canopy continuity: the measurable indicators ecologists use to predict whether a kelp forest will recover.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Science8 min read
The Waiting Game: How Kelp Gametophytes Pause Life for Better Conditions
Between kelp generations lives a microscopic stage that can simply wait — pausing reproduction through heat, dark and scarcity. Inside gametophyte dormancy.
Dr. Elias Brandt ·
Science9 min read
How Kelp Spores Travel: Dispersal and the Hidden Map of Coastal Connectivity
Kelp forests only look isolated. Spores, drifting fronds and invisible currents link reefs into a network — and that map is the key to restoring them.
Dr. Elias Brandt ·
Science10 min read
Drifters and Swimmers: How Marine Life Colonises New Reefs
Almost every reef animal and alga spreads as a drifting larva or spore. How far they travel — and which reefs talk to which — decides how kelp recovers.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Atlas8 min read
Korea's East Sea: The Ecklonia cava Kelp Forests and the Haenyeo
Where warm and cold currents meet off Korea's east coast, Ecklonia cava forests are being rebuilt — and the haenyeo women divers still work the sea.
Tom Okafor ·
Field Notes9 min read
Field Notes: The Storm Damage Report We Didn't Want to Write
A February storm took eleven of sixty seeded lines off the Mendocino coast. This is the honest write-up: what failed, what it cost, and what changes.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Counting the Urchin Front
Join Tidewright's dive survey team as they count an advancing urchin front on Tasmania's coast — the methodical, cold, essential math of kelp restoration.
Jack Callum ·
Science7 min read
Holdfast Biology: How Kelp Grips Rock Without Roots
Kelp has no true roots — its holdfast is a branching biological anchor built for storms. Explore holdfast anatomy, how kelp really feeds, and its hidden biodiversity.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Careers8 min read
Marine Restoration Technician: The Hands-On Job Rebuilding Reefs and Forests
Restoration technicians do the physical work of rebuilding kelp forests, reefs and seagrass beds. The skills, tickets, employers and routes into the trade.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes9 min read
Field Notes: Storm Season on Catalina
A Pacific storm season tests Tidewright's Catalina restoration site. Field notes on survey dives between swells, storm-torn kelp, and which Holdfast lines held.
Jack Callum ·
Atlas11 min read
Tasmania's Vanishing Giant Kelp: What Happened and What's Being Done
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 ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Week One Seeding the Tinderbox Reefs
Tidewright's field crew logs their first week seeding Holdfast lines at Tinderbox, Tasmania — survey dives, southerly swells, and 40,000 metres of seeded line.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Counting Otters at Catalina: A Dawn Colony-Watch and What the Numbers Told Us
Sea otters are strangers at Catalina — so when one appeared over Tidewright's restoration block, we built a dawn count around him. What the survey found.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Field Notes8 min read
The First Transect After the Storm: Notes from a Mendocino Monitoring Dive
After the February storm that took eleven seeded lines at Mendocino, the first formal belt transect told a calmer, stranger story. Notes from the dive.
Jack Callum ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: Sounding the Edge of a Barren
A Tidewright field dispatch: transecting the moving edge of an urchin barren by Drifter sonar and drop camera, and deciding where next season's Holdfast lines go.
Jack Callum ·
Science7 min read
The Restoration Toolkit: What the Evidence Says About Rebuilding Kelp
Green gravel, seeded lines, urchin culling, spore bags, assisted migration — how the main kelp restoration methods compare on cost, scale and evidence of success.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Science11 min read
Succession at Sea: How a Bare Reef Becomes a Forest Again
Ecological succession explains how a bare rocky reef rebuilds into a kelp forest — the pioneer algae, understory kelps, canopy giants, and what restoration can safely skip.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Science8 min read
What Grows Back First: Succession on a Cleared Kelp Reef
After a heatwave, storm or harvest clears a kelp forest, the reef rebuilds in a predictable order. The stage-by-stage science of marine succession.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Field Notes8 min read
Field Notes: A Sunflower Star Back on the Quadrat
A Tidewright dispatch: the first sunflower star recorded on a long-running transect since the wasting years, and an honest crew argument about what one animal means.
Jack Callum ·
Science10 min read
Edge Effects in Kelp Forests: Why Patch Size Changes Everything
A kelp forest's edge is not its boundary but a habitat of its own. How perimeter, patch size and geometry decide survival, diversity and restoration design on temperate reefs.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Blue Carbon9 min read
Kelp Carbon Methodologies Compared: A Buyer's Guide to the Alphabet Soup
Kelp carbon methodologies are multiplying. This buyer's guide compares the main accounting families and the questions to ask of every one of them.
Priya Raman ·
Blue Carbon9 min read
Frontier Blue-Carbon Markets: Kelp, Sediments and the Next Wave of Ocean Credits
Beyond mangroves lies the frontier of blue carbon: kelp export, seabed sediments and ocean alkalinity. What buyers should know about early-stage credits.
Priya Raman ·
Explore8 min read
Citizen Science from the Shore: Beach Walks That Actually Help Kelp Forests
How shoreline citizen science — from iNaturalist to kelp-cast surveys — feeds real kelp forest research. What to record, how to join, and why it matters.
Tom Okafor ·
Encyclopedia9 min read
Bull Kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana): Species Profile
Meet bull kelp, the fast-growing annual giant of North America's Pacific coast — its biology, Indigenous heritage, dramatic decline and the race to restore it.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·