The Kelp Ecosystem Ecology Network (KEEN) is a collection of marine scientists around the globe interested in assessing the impacts of global change on kelp forests. Kelp forests are ubiquitous along temperate coasts, covering 25% of the world’s coastline. Kelps themselves are a critically important species, forming the foundation of many temperate and boreal coastal ecosystems. Different aspects of global change that affect kelps can therefore have a large impact on the goods and services those ecosystems provide by rippling through the entire ecosystem. We seek to understand how these critical ecosystems may therefore be changed in the future, and to what extent they will be resistant and resilient to changes in our oceans. To this end, we seek to work together to accomplish three goals:

1) Finding and unifying past kelp forest monitoring data sets from a wide variety of sources. We want to see what we can say about the effects of different drivers of global change worldwide.

2) Working together to conduct parallel experimental manipulations to use global variation in the ecology and evolution of kelp systems in order to determine how kelp forests will change in the future.

3) Working together to create a standardized kelp forest observational sampling protocol to create a unified global kelp forest community dataset for public use.