The incredible revival of Tasmania's lost kelp forests

Scott Ling noticed the effects of climate change on our oceans long before he became a marine biologist. Growing up fishing along Tasmania’s rugged east coast, he could see the dramatic transformation with his own eyes. 

First came the warm water fish. Then came the sea urchins, devouring the local vegetation and destabilising the region’s delicate marine ecosystem. But it was the disappearance of Tasmania’s giant kelp forests that had the most profound impact on the seascape he knew as a child.

Standing up to 40 metres tall, the sprawling thickets were once so immense that swimming through them felt like navigating dense, underwater jungles. They provided a home to countless marine life, acting as critical habitats and breeding grounds. And then they suddenly started to disappear.

“We had a really big dieback of giant kelp in 2001,” explains Scott, an associate professor at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies. The culprit – a potent combination of warmer water and invasive species – reduced the vibrant ecosystems to barren seascapes. Twenty-three years later, 95% of Tasmania’s kelp forests have vanished.

But peek under Tasmania’s coastal waters today and you just might see new life taking root. Scott leads the research arm of the Tasmanian Giant Kelp Restoration Project, a collaboration between The Nature Conservancy and other partners focused on reviving these underwater forests. 

To do this, Scott’s team employs a technique called kelp outplanting, where young kelp is grown in a laboratory before being attached to twine and transplanted into the ocean. The genius of Scott’s solution is that it ensures the kelp’s stability in the roiling ocean waters by securing it to existing reefs.

“It’s exhilarating work,” Scott says, in part because you can see the positive effects occurring almost in real-time. “You have these magic beans, and they just grow so fast,” he says. A seed planted today can be 10 metres tall within just a year.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Scott is already focused on solving the next problem: “How do we scale up? How do we make it self-sustainable and get these ecosystems to come back?” 

Success will rely on all the project’s partners, which include The University of Tasmania, Natural Resource Management South and the CSIRO. But Scott singles out The Nature Conservancy as maybe the most crucial partner in the next phase. “They really helped us put together the kelp restoration handbook. And now they’re helping us move from replanting trees to replanting whole forests.”

Read the full Conservation Impact Report: January 2022-June 2024 here