SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) – A UC Santa Barbara researcher published a paper detailing the intricate impact that kelp forests along local beaches have on the surrounding environment even while dead and dying.
Dr. Kyle Emery with UC Santa Barbara's Marine Science Institute led a team of researchers in surveying 24 local beaches in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties over three separate periods and analyzed the impact of one particular marine plant on the biodiversity found at each beach.
The result of his analysis, Food web structure and ecosystem multifunctionality in a subsidized coastal ecosystem was published in Nature Scientific Reports late last year.
The local beaches used to in Dr. Emery's research courtesy of Food web structure and ecosystem multifunctionality in a subsidized coastal ecosystem in Nature Scientific Reports on Nov. 7, 2025.Research that helped in the development of the study was also conducted by the Marine Science Institute's Jenifer E. Dugan, David M. Hubbard, Jessica R. Madden, and Robert J. Miller as well as J. Carter Ohlmann with UC Santa Barbara's Earth Research Institute.
While we might see beaches as a borderline between our terrestrial home and the open ocean, this dynamic environment is home to a crucial life form that has a substantial impact on the both regions, kelp.
Don't call it a plant! Kelp is a term that refers to around 30 species of marine algae. They tend to grow in large, dense groupings we call a kelp forest.
A California kelp forest. Image courtesy of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.The marine forests are home to an exceptional number of plant and animal species and are a crucial part of federally protected waters locally including the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, and the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.
A common type you might see along California beaches is Macrocystis pyrifera or Giant Kelp.
Macrocystis pyrifera. Image courtesy of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.Living kelp forests are proven to protect beaches from erosion as shown in the images below from the Fish Reef Project, an organization that installed artificial sea caves in the Goleta Bay to restore a kelp forest to the area.
We land-based life forms mostly see kelp at the end of its life cycle, washed up on beaches in smelly piles known as wrack, but what might make you move your beach towel actually plays an important part in the health of the beach by providing crucial nutrients to the surrounding environment.
Bull kelp serving as wrack at Asilomar State Marine Reserve. Image courtesy of K. Gonzales/California Department of Fish and Wildlife."Even as detritus [washed up debris], these species [that make up wrack] continues to function as a foundational species in subsidized recipient ecosystems," noted the study. "The structure (habitat) and basal resources [the foundational base of energy in an environment] supplied by wrack subsidies influence the bottom-up dynamics of sandy beach ecosystems across the globe with predators at the top of the beach food web relying on prey supported by inputs of marine subsidies."
While kelp is a large example of what makes up the wrack we see on beaches, the most common part, 67 percent of wrack recorded during the study, came from surfgrass, according to Dr. Emery's research.
Surfgrass exposed during low tide at Channel Islands National Park courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service.Beaches are, while very beautiful spaces, rather bare especially when it comes to supporting life. That means that as an ecosystem, it is notably dependent on external sources of nutrients.
"Ecosystems with little to no in situ [original location] primary production may be disproportionately dependent on resources from other ecosystems," opened Dr. Emery's research paper. "We examined the role of basal resource [the foundational base of energy in an environment] availability on community structure and ecosystem multifunctionality of sandy beaches. We hypothesized that substantial marine macrophyte wrack inputs from productive nearshore ecosystems, like kelp forests, would drive recipient beach ecosystem structure and function."
We know that wrack is a crucial input to the beach environment and to show just how much it is, Dr. Emery and his team captured data at local beaches multiple times and measured the contributions of wrack in five, interconnected ways: nutrient concentrations, the change in carbon dioxide in intertidal sediment, the secondary production of talitrid amphipods (also known as sand-hoppers, the most common macroinvertebrate consumer of wrack), flying insect abundance, and primary prey resource for higher trophic consumers (creatures higher in the food chain than macroinvertebrates that directly consume wrack).
An amphipdod from the Talitridae family. Image courtesy of the Bioeconomy Science Institute."We hypothesized that wrack subsidies [to the studied beaches] would have direct positive impacts through the provisioning of food and habitat," explained Dr. Embry in the study. "We also predicted that wrack inputs would impact the relationship between detritivores [animals that eat decaying organics] and predators as well as have positive impacts on ecosystem multifunctionality."
The results of the study confirmed many of the researchers expectations.
"Model results indicated wrack abundance had a strong positive association with detritivore diversity," noted the study. "Wrack resource abundance influenced the intertidal macroinvertebrate food web across two trophic levels and multiple ecosystem functions, including strong positive effects on detritivore diversity, the biomass of both detritivores and predators, and ecosystem multifunctionality."
Figure 2 below from the Dr. Embry's study shows the interconnectivity the researchers found with wrack as a base of energy for beach environments as well as the life forms that directly and indirectly benefit from its presence.
"Our results showed that the magnitude of this cross-ecosystem connectivity, quantified here as the abundance of wrack subsidies, directly influenced the structure of multiple trophic levels of the intertidal beach food web, from invertebrate detritivores to predatory shorebirds," concluded the study. "The diversity, abundance, and biomass of these key trophic groups were all enhanced by the amount of wrack subsidies delivered to the beach ecosystem. Importantly, wrack subsidies were also strong predictors of ecosystem multifunctionality, an integrative measure of multiple ecosystem functions. The high responsiveness of ecosystem multifunctionality to wrack subsidies highlights the profound influence of these resource inputs on sandy beach ecosystems."
Dr. Embry's research captured how interconnected dead and dying marine organisms in wrack are to the beach environment and how they play a crucial element going forward as those environments confront a rapidly changing climate.
"During a time of rapid environmental change, the dynamics of cross-ecosystem connectivity and its role in trophic and functioning support may be greatly affected, increasing the vulnerability of both donor and recipient ecosystems," warned the study. "As impacts to donor ecosystems can cascade to recipient ecosystems, predicted declines of giant kelp carry significant implications not only for subtidal reefs, but also for kelp subsidy-dependent intertidal systems like beaches. Combined with loss of beach habitat from sea level rise, erosion and coastal development, the loss of kelp subsidies could result in fundamental ecosystem changes including wildlife declines and species extinctions. Escalating pressures are already driving shifts in species distributions, declines in biodiversity, and reductions to ecosystem functioning in coastal ecosystems. As the impacts of climate change continue to imperil coastal ecosystems, increasing our understanding of the role of ecosystem connectivity on ecological structure and functioning will provide needed insights and tools for the conservation of these vulnerable systems and their irreplaceable ecosystem functions."
A harbor seal in a kelp forest at Matlahuayl State Marine Reserve. Image courtesy of M. Haggerty/California Department of Fish and Wildlife.UC Santa Barbara research shows how import the end of kelp life cycle is to beach environments News Channel 3-12.
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