Habitat fragmentation causes collapse of kelp recruitment

Kelp forests in many regions are experiencing disturbance from anthropogenic sources such as ocean warming, pollution, and overgrazing. Unlike natural disturbances such as storms, anthropogenic disturbances often manifest as press perturbations that cause persistent alterations to the environment. One consequence is that some kelp forests are becoming increasingly sparse and fragmented. We manipulated patch size of the kelp Ecklonia radiata over 24 mo to simulate persistent habitat fragmentation and assessed how this influenced the demography of macro- and microscopic juvenile kelp within the patches. At the beginning of the experiment, patch formation resulted in short-term increases in E. radiata recruitment in patches