This fall, federal funding will launch an unprecedented restoration effort that hopes to change California’s coast forever. With $18 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, The Nature Conservancy and its 11 partners across the state hope to “transform the way ocean restoration is done in California,” says Bryan DeAngelis, the lead TNC scientist on the grant.
Conservation groups are often islands, laser-focused on their one piece of the ecosystem. TNC’s goal for the Pacific Coast Ocean Restoration grant (dubbed PCOR) is to unite research institutions, nonprofits, and agencies already working on restoration across the state, and coordinate their efforts. Money will support work across the land and sea. While Mendocino College develops a certification program in marine restoration, the Greater Farallones Association (the nonprofit partner to the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary) will be continuing its efforts to grow kelp from lab-grown spores. “It’s summing the parts,” says DeAngelis. “And we are going to be greater than the sum of the parts.”
It’s not been easy, being the Pacific coast. Nineteenth-century fur hunters decimated sea otter populations; coastal development decimated shoreline habitat, and all the protection they provided for animals. Climate change threatens to suffocate the upwellings of cold water that keep the coast alive. And in 2013, a mysterious wasting disease slew nearly all the sea stars that were the apex predator in kelp forests, which triggered widespread ecosystem collapse.
“I grew up in a time when there was a relatively more abundant ocean,” Tristin McHugh, a marine biologist at TNC, says. “I remember what that looks like.” The hope that the ocean may one day return to that abundance now drives McHugh’s work with TNC and their collaborators.
This story is part of Wild Billions, a Bay Nature project exploring the impact of big federal money on Bay Area nature.
The project’s ambitions hatch in laboratories, where scientists are trialing new strategies to rear and eventually re-introduce sunflower sea stars and abalone. Meanwhile, at coastal sites from Sonoma to Mendocino, TNC hopes to assemble one of the largest networks of bull kelp restoration sites in history. And in the classroom, they’re starting courses with Mendocino College to train students to become coastal restoration technicians.
By working on kelp restoration at every level, the groups hope to build an ecosystem on land to support those in the ocean. “We need bodies in the field to be able to do the work,” says Danielle Lipski, a research ecologist working on kelp restoration projects with NOAA’s Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuaries, who was not involved with this grant. “And there’s not a lot of people who have experience doing this.”
While many East Asian countries have centuries-long histories of restoring their unique kelp ecosystems, McHugh notes, it’s “a newer Western practice”; California kelp restoration is still in its infancy. Basic questions of how to raise enough sea stars and abalones to reintroduce them to kelp remain unanswered. Meanwhile, much of TNC and NOAA’s restoration work in the water has operated on modestly sized experimental scales, with projects on the order of a couple acres.
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To expand across tens or hundreds of acres of kelp, marine biologists say that the more partners that work together, the more likely it is they can perfect these budding approaches. “We’re using each other’s work to just elevate each other instead of competing or working in a silo,” says McHugh. And she says any restoration site’s success can spill over to the rest of the coastline. “These are going to be the seed source.”
State and philanthropic funds have helped scientists inch towards understanding what kelp forests needed, McHugh says. Now, this new scale of federal funding lets them plan for the California coast’s future on multi-year time scales. For McHugh, it is a sign that people are at last valuing the ocean—a much-needed “cultural awakening,” she says. “This is an ecosystem we need to steward into the future.”
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