My Science

Below, I highlight some of the science projects I have led, particularly from my time in academia. As I transition into new roles outside of academia, like my current position at the Oregon Kelp Alliance, more of my work will focus on applied research, management, restoration, community building, and education and less on discrete scientific papers. So stay tuned for a new page that highlights the broader array of work I do in the future.

Assessing the status of Oregon's kelp forests to support stewardship

My main focus in 2023 and 2024 has been leading a federally funded project to create a status report for Oregon's kelp forest ecosystems for the Oregon Kelp Alliance. This has involved coordinating and leading new SCUBA and aerial surveys as well as wrangling several historical datasets to inform our best understanding as to the health of kelp forests ecosystems ranging across the state. The report will be released in June 2024, so be on the lookout!

The impacts of ocean acidification and hypoxia at a sea scape scale

While a postdoc in Tessa Hill's Ocean Climate Lab at UC Davis from 2022-2023, I used data from across the US West Coast to 1) identify spatial patterns of exposure to OAH and 2) map the vulnerability of commercially important shellfish to OAH stress. As of January 2024 one of these papers is published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science and another one is in prep. A huge shoutout to everyone in the Hill lab for being wonderful collaborators and helping me build my skills in oceanography and using big spatial data.

Population ecology of the sunflower sea star to support conservation

Together with the Nature Conservancy and the Pycnopodia Recovery Team, I've co-lead a successful effort to list the Sunflower Sea Star as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Check out my 2021 paper that uses a large meta-dataset to assess how the species was impacted by SSWD across its entire range from Baja California, MX to the Aleutian Islands, USA and what this means for recovery and conservation efforts. Photo by Steve Lonhart

Satellite mapping of bull kelp in Oregon

A collaborator from UCSB and I found that we could use Landsat satellite imagery to identify and track the canopy area of this important marine ecosystem engineer. We then used a kelp-detection algorithm to create a 35 year timeseries of bull kelp canopy size in Oregon. We found intense interannual variability in population size, surprising relationships between bull kelp population size and waves and nutrients, and that these populations have not declined since 2014 as has happened in Northern California. Check out the 2020 Ecology paper on my Publications page.

Assessing global kelp management practices

I worked with collaborators at the Nature Conservancy to review management practices around kelp and kelp forests in California, British Columbia, and Chile. We focused particularly on whether kelps were managed as a resource to be harvested or through a more holistic Ecosystem Based Management framework and came up with six recommendations for kelp forest management. Check out the resulting 2022 Marine Policy paper!

Drone mapping of understudied kelp forests

With a grant from the Phycological Society of America, in summer 2021 I began mapping nearshore kelp forests in Oregon using a DJI Inspire II. This project has continued up through 2023 with support from the Oregon Kelp Alliance and will hopefully become the foundation of a long term dataset tracking local scale changes in canopy kelp cover across the state. In addition to their scientific value, the images and videos produced from drone surveys have become crucial communication and engagement tools in the Oregon Kelp Alliance's work (and may show up in a couple places on this website too!).