Deforestation Concerns
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I was wondering: If we find that the amount of Giant Kelp in the world is, in fact, decreasing, should the decrease be treated as a form of deforestation? Not necessarily a man-made deforestation, (although, as the team mentioned in their blog post, coastal urbanization and climate change may contribute to the amount of Giant Kelp changing) but the mass death of a vital plant.
Kelp is home to a wide variety of animals and also produces a great deal of oxygen. I have even read an article that dubs algae, of which kelp is a form of, the 'most important organism'.
So, in that case, would reforestation be needed and/or feasible. I am very interested to hear everyone's views on this.
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jebyrnes
scientist
There are actually kelp restoration programs in some parts of the world. Or installations of artificial reefs to foster growth of new kelp forests.
One reason we're really interested in this project is that Giant Kelp (Macrocystis) has been declared an endangered species in Tasmania. But divers haven't been able to get everywhere, so we want to know what the population trajectory of giant kelp has been there. You might note that a lot of the recent images from Tasmania seem to be pretty empty. There is often kelp there, but it's much smaller Ecklonia radiata which is only a 2-3 feet tall at most, and therefore not visible from space. These zeroes are incredibly important data, particularly if we pick up good populations in Tassie in the 1980s and 1990s.
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hamptongray23
in response to jebyrnes's comment.
Interesting. Do you know when the first preliminary data may be released?
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jebyrnes
scientist
Not sure yet - depends on how long it takes to get through images, and how quickly we can turn that data around. We're hoping to start working on the data pipeline in the next few weeks, but we have a ton more images to serve up - we've only loaded in maybe 1/15th of the images so far. More of the world to come! Hopefully we'll start having clean aggregated data products for some regions within a year - maybe sooner, depending, but I cannot make any promises at this point. Too many unknowns.
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