Award: OCE-1232779

Although there is increasing concern about the impacts of human activities on coastal ecosystems, there have been few long-term studies of the linkages among oceanic, shallow reef, sandy beaches, wetland, and watershed habitats on land. SBC LTER is helping to fill this gap by evaluating oceanic and coastal watershed influences on giant kelp forests, a highly productive and diverse marine ecosystem that occurs in shallow waters of the land-ocean margin in temperate regions throughout the world. The amount of nutrients and organic matter delivered to kelp forests from land and the surrounding ocean varies in response to short- and long-term changes in climate, ocean conditions and human use. Variation in the supply of these commodities interacts with natural and human-induced disturbances to influence the abundance and species composition of the forest inhabitants and the ecological services that they provide. The research conducted during this award period (2012-2019) focused on three inter-related themes: (1) Biotic and abiotic drivers of kelp forest structure and function, (2) Material exchange at the land-ocean margin, and (3) Movement and fluxes of inorganic and organic matter in the coastal ocean. Our research on these themes revealed: (1) The important role of giant kelp as a foundation species and the interactive effects of climate variability and fishing in controlling its abundance and the overall structure and stability of the kelp forest community; (2) The interactive effects of fire, land use and climate on the amount and timing of delivery of nutrients, organic matter and sediments from watersheds to the coastal ocean, and the dependency of sandy beach food webs on the delivery of macrophytes produced offshore in kelp forests (Theme 2); and (3) How temporal (seasonal and inter-annual) and spatial (along shore and cross shelf) variability in different oceanographic processes alter the delivery of nutrients and organic matter to influence the ecological structure and ecosystem functions of giant kelp forest communities (Theme 3). The results from this award were disseminated in 212 journal articles, 6 book chapters, 1 book, 28 PhD dissertations and 10 Master?s theses The ongoing time series data collected by SBC LTER project are providing unique and valuable insights on relevant spatial and temporal scales of key ecological processes, including ecosystem responses to climate and human activities. At this writing the SBC LTER has produced 207 datasets that are fully documented and freely available via the project?s data catalog (https://sbclter.msi.ucsb.edu/data/catalog/) and NSF?s Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO; https://www.bco-dmo.org/project/2227). These datasets are archived and managed by the Environmental Data Initiative (https://environmentaldatainitiative.org/), an NSF funded project that operates a secure data repository that works closely with the US LTER Network Communications Office and DataONE to promote best practices in the management and stewardship of data that are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. University education and training are tightly integrated into all aspects of our research which involved the active participation of 10 post docs, 34 graduate students, and more than 297 undergraduate students during the award period. Our K-12 education program ((schoolyard LTER)) engages teachers and students around a theme of marine and watershed ecology that incorporates SBC LTER research. By partnering with the educational marine aquarium facility at UC Santa Barbara our research results reached > 68,000 students. Last Modified: 01/02/2020 Submitted by: Daniel C Reed