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Kelp forests provide important habitats for many fish species, sea otters and sea urchins. Directly and indirectly, marine coastal ecosystems provide vast arrays of ecosystem services for humans, such as cycling nutrients and elements, and purifying water by filtering pollutants. They sequester carbon as a cushion against climate change.
Seaweed farming is a carbon negative crop, with a high potential for climate change mitigation. [7] [8] The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate recommends "further research attention" as a mitigation tactic. [9] World Wildlife Fund, Oceans 2050, and The Nature Conservancy publicly support expanded seaweed ...
An alternative offset would be to cultivate kelp forests. Kelp can grow at 2 feet per day, 30 times faster than terrestrial plants. Planting kelp across 10% of the oceans (4.5 x the area of Australia) could provide the same offset. Additionally, the kelp would support a fish harvest of 2 megatons per year and reduce ocean acidification. Large ...
The importance of this contribution has been rapidly acknowledged within the scientific community and has prompted an entirely new trajectory of kelp forest research, highlighting the potential for kelp forests to provide marine organisms spatial refuge under climate change and providing possible explanations for evolutionary patterns of kelps ...
Just one example is the giant bull kelp Nereocystis luetkeana, which have evolved to change blade shape in order to increase drag in water and interception of light when exposed to certain environments. Bull kelp are not unique in this adaptation; many kelp species have evolved a genetic plasticity for blade shapes for different water flow ...
Instead, the dams work as a natural fire break and reservoir capable of storing water for years that gets released into land slowly over time to create a more fire- and drought-resistant landscape.
Seagrasses store more than twice as much carbon from planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) per square mile than forests do on land, according to a 2012 study. The plants also help support fisheries ...
But the surface is also on the front line of climate change and pollution. Life on the ocean's surface connects worlds. From shallow waters to the deep sea, the open ocean to rivers and lakes, numerous terrestrial and marine species depend on the surface ecosystem and the organisms found there.