Scientists and indigenous people team up to build a kelp seed bank
Kelps provide food and habitat for myriad coastal creatures. DepositPhotos This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. Kelp is common along temperate shorelines around the world. For millennia, this large brown algae has been vital to coastal Indigenous peoples. In Washington State and British Columbia, kelp is a traditional food source, a focus for commercial cultivation, and habitat for critically endangered and threatened species like rockfish and young salmon. It’s hard to overstate kelp’s value. For the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, says shellfish biologist Annie Raymond, “you can’t quantify how important this biodiversity is, culturally.” But over the past four decades, warming water and other factors have been killing kelps across the Salish Sea. So this summer, Raymond and...