Seasonality in the Falklands

As I’ve been browsing through these beautiful images of classifications in the Falklands, I realized something.  One of the reasons to explore the Falklands is that there aren’t too many studies looking at more long-term kelp dynamics there. Now, I’m a Northern Hemisphere kelp forest ecologist. We know that typically many types of kelp forests start to boom in the spring, get to peak biomass in the late summer/early fall, and then get whacked back by fall/winter storms before booming again in the spring.

A #sokelpy image in #march

One of the first questions I have as a scientist, then, is do we see the same seasonal trends in the Falklands? I’m very curious what y’all are seeing, so, I started a thread on talk asking y’all to note any observations. Please also tag very kelpy images with the month they were taken (click the (i) for information) as well as the #sokelpy hashtag, so I can do a quick search by hashtag to see frequency of when #sokelpy occured. I’ll post the resulting data after we get a decent set of tagged images.

And talk about what you’re seeing – month by month, or if you’re noticing certain years have more or less kelp over in the thread!

(And, heck, we haven’t even talked about north v. south side of the islands – but that’s for another time!)