The goods and services provided by coastal oceanic ecosystems greatly benefit society, but
their sustainability is increasingly threatened by coastal development, pollution, fishing, and
changing climate. Long-term ecological studies of these important ecosystems are necessary for
understanding the consequences of such threats and how to mitigate them. Focusing on key
"foundation species" that create habitat and affect environmental conditions around them
improves our understanding of the ecosystem as a whole. The Santa Barbara Coastal Long Term
Ecological Research program (SBC LTER) demonstrates the value of long-term studies for
understanding foundation species through its focus on kelp forest ecosystems. The giant kelp
Macrocystis pyrifera, the world’s largest seaweed species, creates extremely productive ocean
forests that harbor a myriad of other species and are highly valued in coastal temperate regions
worldwide. Giant kelp forests are dynamic, characterized by frequent disturbance from storms,
grazing, and other natural and human-induced phenomena that remove kelp, often followed by
rapid regeneration and recovery. This makes kelp forests ideal for investigating the effects of
environmental change and human actions on fundamental ecological processes that require
centuries to address in other ecosystems, including forests on land. Understanding the nature
of such processes that apply to all ecosystems is a key element of SBC LTER research. Broader
impacts of the project are enhanced by integrating the research with a diverse array of
education and outreach programs that target K-12 education, teacher professional
development, undergraduate and graduate student training, and stakeholder engagement.

SBC LTER's research builds upon its prior results to advance a predictive understanding of how
natural disturbance, climate variation, and human actions (i.e., fishing and coastal
development) alter the ecological structure and function of kelp forest ecosystems, and identify
the mechanisms that underlie these processes. Kelp forests are connected to one another and
to the surrounding coastal ocean and adjacent intertidal beaches via the exchange of living and
non-living materials. Thus, predicting the causes and consequences of kelp forest responses to
environmental change requires integrated studies of a wide range of physical, chemical and
biological processes occurring on the seafloor and in the water column within and outside of
the kelp forest to fully capture the dynamics of material exchange. Integration of these studies
is accomplished by research that is organized spatially in a dynamic setting of changing climate
and oceanography from the scale of a local kelp forest community and the ecological
interactions and ecosystem processes occurring within it to a much larger landscape of
interacting kelp forests and adjacent waters and beaches. Synthesis of the project's findings
across different levels of biological organization and different spatial and temporal scales is
achieved through statistical, analytical and numerical models that combine SBC and other long-
term ecological and environmental time-series data with relationships, mechanisms and
processes obtained from shorter-term, but more intensive studies.