Kelp beds provide significant ecosystem services and socioeconomic benefits globally, and prominently in coastal zones of the California Current. Their distributions and abundance, however, vary greatly over space and time. Here, we describe long-term patterns of Giant Kelp ( Macrocystis pyrifera ) sea surface canopy area off the coast of San Diego County from 1983 through 2019 along with recent patterns of water column nitrat...

Aim Marine habitats and their dynamics are difficult to systematically monitor, particularly those in remote locations. This is the case with the sub‐Antarctic ecosystem of the giant kelp Macrocystis pyrifera , which was already noted by Charles Darwin in his accounts on the Voyage of the Beagle and recorded on the nautical charts made during that expedition. We combined these and other nautical charts from the 19th and early...

We review the precautionary approach to fisheries management, propose a framework that will allow a systematic assessment of insufficient precaution and provide an illustration using an Antarctic fishery. For a single‐species fishery, our framework includes five attributes: (1) limit reference points that recognize gaps in our understanding of the dynamics of the species; (2) accurate measures of population size; (3) ability t...

Robert T. Paine, who passed away on 13 June 2016, is among the most influential people in the history of ecology. Paine was an experimentalist, a theoretician, a practitioner, and proponent of the “ecology of place,” and a deep believer in the importance of natural history to ecological understanding. His scientific legacy grew from the discovery of a link between top‐down forcing and species diversity, a breakthrough that led...

The estimation of the strength of the interaction between species is key for understanding the organization of ecological communities. Although experimental and observational studies have estimated per capita interaction strength for individual consumers, no previous study has used such estimates for predicting the impact of a community of consumers on their prey in the field. Here we evaluate experimental estimates of per cap...

The nutrient climate on the inner shelf off southern California changed markedly across the 1976‐1977 North Pacific climate regime shift. With respect to giant kelp ( Macrocystis pyrifera ) canopies off southern California, the nitrate climate shifted from relatively replete conditions prior to the regime shift to depleted conditions afterward, and the dynamics of 14 giant kelp forests appeared to change as a result. The respo...