12.23.25

Growing kelp for community

A grow line on a kelp farm in Prince William Sound, Alaska.

The activities are as follows:

When thinking about farming, many people imagine fields of corn or soybeans, or even their own vegetable garden. All of these crops are grown on land, but what about growing food in the ocean? Alaska Natives who live along the coast have been harvesting kelp, a group of seaweeds, from the wild for thousands of years. Kelp is very nutritious and is full of vitamins and minerals. It is used in a variety of dishes, from soups to salads. Kelp also provides structure for herring to lay their eggs, another traditional food source that coastal Alaska Native communities harvest. Kelp has other purposes too, including soil fertilizer and food additive applications.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in farming kelp at a larger scale along the Alaskan coast. Farming kelp involves cultivating kelp at a site to grow larger for harvest. Caitlin is a biologist who works for the Native Village of Eyak within the Prince William Sound of Alaska. The Tribe wants to start a kelp farm to provide a nutritious food source for its community members. Caitlin was tasked with designing the farm setup and testing how much kelp can be grown. Her first step was to find a site. She had to consider environmental factors that help the kelp grow. Kelp need particular nutrients and cool water temperatures. She also had to make sure the site was easy to get to and that it was protected from intense weather like high winds and large waves. 

Left: seed line one week after planting in November. Middle: kelp at the farm in April. Right: kelp blades after the harvest in June. 

To get started, Caitlin talked to the members of the Eyak community to learn where they have historically found kelp, called Traditional Knowledge. She listened to their suggestions, which were based on current and long-term connections with the local environment. This helped her identify a site that is a short boat ride. Caitlin also had discussions with other kelp farmers in Alaska and read scientific research articles to learn more about how to set up a kelp farm and which species would be a good fit. She decided to grow sugar kelp because it has a sweeter taste and grows well in other places with similar conditions. 

She designed the farm to grow the kelp vertically in the water. To do this, she would place lines vertically in the water for kelp to attach and grow at different depths. This design maximizes the amount of kelp grown below the surface, which is good to minimize interference with boats and animals. While vertical lines have benefits, there could be drawbacks too. Kelp needs sunlight for photosynthesis, which it uses to grow. But the deeper you go in the water, the less sunlight there is. The kelp at the surface will get plenty of light, but the kelp attached to the line in deeper water might not get enough. The kelp at the bottom could also get blocked or shaded by the kelp above it. 

Caitlin wanted to know if there is a time of year when kelp had the fastest growth rates. This information would help her know when to harvest kelp from the site. She also wanted to know whether depth affected the kelp growth. If it turned out that kelp didn’t grow on her vertical lines in deeper water, she may have to try another design. She predicted that kelp grown in the first 1-2 meters from the surface would grow more over a season because it would receive the most sunlight. 

To assess her kelp farm plan, Caitlin worked with partners to seed lines with fertilized sugar kelp spores. Each of these spores can grow into a large kelp blade that can be up to 5 meters long. The seeded lines were then installed vertically at the farm site in the fall of 2022. Caitlin and her colleagues set up 532 vertical lines that were each 10 meters long. In total, over 2 miles of seeded line were installed on the farm! The lines were attached to a horizontal line to secure them in place and were spaced out so they had room to grow. 

Each month, Caitlin and her colleagues monitored the kelp growth by measuring the length of kelp blades, or leaf-like structures, on 5-8 of the seeded lines. On each line, they measured kelp blades at different depths so they could see how the kelp was growing at different depths.

Featured scientist: Caitlin McKinstry (she/her) from the Native Village of Eyak. Written with Rosel Burt and Melissa Kjelvik from Prince William Sound College.

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 7.4

Additional teacher resource related to this Data Nugget:

This Data Nugget created with funding from the NSF Alaska EPSCoR Interface of Change.

10.15.25

Stormy shorelines

A scientist adding water to simulate flooding.

The activities are as follows:

Chevak is a village that sits along the Ningliqvak River in Alaska. The area around the village is a flat coastal wetland, a landscape of winding river channels, marshes, and salty lakes. In the Yup’ik language, this low-lying terrain is called maraq. Here, salt-tolerant grasses and sedges thrive in an environment with brackish water, which is saltier than fresh water, but less salty than sea water. These wetlands serve as nesting grounds for waterfowl during the spring and summer months.

Further upland, the higher ground that sits roughly three meters in elevation is called nunapik, meaning tundra. Brackish water does not usually touch these areas. The tundra has many freshwater lakes and supports a different plant community, rich with forbs, shrubs, and lichen. Because it experiences less flooding, more types of plants can live in the upland tundra, providing important resources for food and medicine.

In recent years, coastal flooding has become more common near Chevak. Protective sea ice melts earlier each year. Storm surges and rising sea levels now push brackish water further inland. These flooding events increase erosion, damage property, and alter the delicate balance of wetland and tundra ecosystems.

Ecologists Karen, Kathy, and Josh began studying the plants around Chevak to better understand how flooding affects these ecosystems. To understand how plant communities at high and low elevations respond to flooding, the scientists designed an experiment at Old Chevak, the original village site abandoned decades ago due to flooding.

Chevak, a village in Alaska.

Working in collaboration with the Chevak community and the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, they established experimental plots to simulate flooding. The flooded plots were created by pumping in seawater to simulate high-tide flooding. This was repeated 3 times during the summer. Karen, Kathy, and Josh also kept control plots where no brackish water was added. The treatments were repeated at both high and low elevation sites. There were 7 replicates at each location.

At the summer’s end the team collected data on plant growth. They measured the biomass, or weight, of all plants in all of the plots. Karen, Kathy, and Josh grouped the plants into 4 groups. Graminoids, which include grasses and sedges, are the dominant plant group of the maraq. They typically grow well in flooded wetland areas. Forbs are broadleaf herbs, like salmonberries, that grow well in the nunapik. Shrubs include species such as blueberries, cranberries, and tundra tea. Like forbs, they also grow well in the nunapik. Lichens are plant-like species that form low crusts along the ground and are only found in the higher elevation sites.

Karen, Kathy, and Josh thought that plants from the low elevation sites would be made up of more salt and flood-tolerant species and would therefore be less harmed by frequent floods. On the other hand, high elevation sites would consist mostly of plant species that are not salt or flood-tolerant and would not do well during floods.

Featured scientists: Karen Beard (she/her) of Utah State University, Kathy Kelsey (she/her) of the University of Colorado Denver and Joshua Leffler (he/him) of South Dakota State University. Written by: Andrea Pokrzywinski (she/her).

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Grade Level = 8.9

Additional Resources:

This activity pairs with another Data Nugget, “Salmonberries in our future”, which features this same collaboration, but focuses on one culturally significant type of Arctic plant, salmonberries.

Additional video resources and lesson extensions can be found at the project website “Working Together”, including the following:

  • “Voices from the Land” introduces the collaboration between scientists and Yup’ik community members. They are working together to respect and care for the land. This narrative is told by the students from Bethel and Chevak Alaska. 
  • “Mapping Merbok” describes the questions scientists are researching to document how increased flooding, such as that from Typhoon Merbok, will drive landscape changes.
  • “Warming and Flooding on the Tundra” describes the research scientists are conducting to measure the impact of both warming and flooding on plant communities.