I’m hoping the community here can help me with a very exciting project to help restore the kelp forest of Northern Norway!
Urchin barrens/deserts have dominated northern Norway for decades now, potentially eating up 80% of the kelp forests. I’m working with a restoration project called Ocean Green where we’re developing a harvesting tool for large-scale removal of these urchins to allow the kelp forest to return.
However, the research institutions lack a real map of where the largest urchin barrens are, and, being a free diver myself, I know the power and data that probably sit amongst the community here!
Therefore, my ask to the community is that if any green urchin barrens are sighted, you could upload photos and locations to help determine the best way to map this issue! The species is the green sea urchin (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis), I’m looking for locations where there are 1000s of them, not just individuals.
If this outreach works, we will make some noise about how the community here is the one that was able to help solve this mapping issue that has existed for years!!
welcome to the forum, sounds like an interesting project
however, I don’t think the forum is going to be the most successful avenue for you for this outreach; a tiny % of all iNaturalist users are active on this forum, and a tiny fraction of those again would be from Norway
your best bet would be to create an account at iNaturalist itself if you haven’t already, write up a journal post, and tag some of the most active observers/observers with observations of urchins or other marine species from the region, explaining the project to them
Also, when making a project, there are projects that automatically add any members’ observations that have X or Y in that area. Such as this one for invasive plant species in Hungary.
There might be some indications at the surface that are visible via Google Maps, but that would depend on a lot of factors ranging from wind making the water surface too rough to tell anything, sunlight angles refection things, algae blooms, etc, as well as when the image as taken.
The default images Google uses are not updated all that often and can be years out of date, sometimes well over a decade. Using Google Earth Pro offline and turning on the history can help a bit with that, but not all that much.
Ah, sorry, was thinking of that fellow in Florida who spotted the car in the manmade lake using Google maps, though it was not at all visible from shore, solving a twenty year old mystery.
I have no idea how one maps observations at the sea bottom, so was just assuming they were sort of associated with the shore line in some way, sorry, was a poor question after all.
Not really a poor question. Some mature kept forests are visible at the surface where the kelp strands reach the surface and spread out.
The issue is that you might be able to see where kelp is, but in areas where kelp is not you have no way of knowing if it’s a urchin barren or just a place where kelp normally doesn’t grow.
You’d need historical data to compare against.
Not a bad question, just a more complicate situation.