 I want to begin today, as we always do, with a land acknowledgment. The Archaeological Research Facility recognizes that Berkeley sits on the territory of Ho Chiun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land. By offering this land acknowledgment, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California of Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. This week, I am positively stoked to introduce a fellow Californian here, our very own Mike Growne. Dr. Mike Growne is a brand new PhD out of Kent Lightfoot's Cal Lab here at Berkeley. He has worked on all sorts of California archaeology, particularly focusing on the Central Coast. As part of a collaborative project with the Alma-Mudson Tribal Band, Mike's dissertation research focused on the archaeology of indigenous management of marine resources on the Central Coast, applying archaeological data to inform and revitalize traditional ecological knowledge and stewardship of intertidal resources such as shellfish and seaweed, taking a holistic integrative approach to applying archaeological insight to contemporary issues of coastal stewardship, indigenous food security and sovereignty, fisheries management and restoration ecology. Mike is interested in a whole nexus of topics that are fascinating to us here at the ARF. Certainly fascinating to me, looking at historical ecology, collaborative archaeology, traditional resource management, and to boot, he is an archaeomalacologist, which I think is one of the coolest subfield names you could have. We're having the pleasure of having him take us on a tour of shoreline management practices over a section of the California Central Coast today, which I'm particularly excited for because I've gotten to work on a tiny corner of that data myself or related data. I'm really, really excited to see the broader context here. If you have questions for Mike during the talk, please put them in the chat and I will relay them to him afterwards. Without any further ado, I will pass it over to Mike for a chat of mollusks and midden. Thank you, Jordan, so much for that lovely introduction. I'm happy to be here with all of y'all today, if I couldn't meet in person. Missed many of you tremendously and I unceremoniously had to finish up the PhD and leave the department without any proper farewells, so today we're going to maybe get a little bit of farewell in and also talk about future work, ongoing work and projects that I've been working on for about the past eight years or so along the Central California Coast, mostly dealing with Indigenous stewardship of marine resources as indicated in the title, which is also the title of my dissertation. A couple of research projects I did during my dissertation work at UC Berkeley, a few other projects will be omitted from this talk and I'll make mention of why in just a little bit, but really excited to be here and looking forward to getting the ball rolling, so let's do just that. So when I came to the California Archaeology Lab at UC Berkeley, I was fortunate to come into a very active and productive research environment with a lot of great colleagues who I owe a tremendous thanks to and also it really opened the door for a lot of different collaborative relationships within the area. There was already active research projects going on in the Cal Lab down here at Pinnacles National Park. There was other projects, another project with Peter Nelson up in Tolle Valley, now it was a collaborative project with the Indian Indians of Great New Rancheria. Down here in the Oni and Ouevo region, Rob Cuthrill and Chuck Strupplin and the Oni and Tribal Band were working together doing eco-archaeology and looking at the use of fire as a management tool for landscapes. And we also conducted a bit of research up here in Point Reyes National Seashore looking at about nine different sites that were endangered because of sea level rise and erosion. For the purposes of this talk today, I'm going to focus in on the Oni and Ouevo study region. Though we have a really interesting archeomalachological project looking at clam gardens in Tomoleth Bay and Kosmi Walk Stewardship of those gardens, however that data and interpretations are still under tribal review. So with respect to the Federida Indians of Great New Rancheria, I'm going to hold off on that and focus in on this project down here in Oni and Ouevo. In order to do that, to preface that, I'm going to show you all a little video that Berkeley Media was so kind to come and do on our research in the field and in the lab to kind of put some faces to the names that I'm going to be talking about today and maybe some places as well. So I'm going to switch over here real quick to a different screen and show a video about this collaborative enterprise. Here we go. As part of our Campfire Dessert Lectures series, we have the amazing Val Lopez in-person live. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Leipzig. Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here. Our creation story takes place at Mount Uminum on the Santa Cruz Mountains just south of Highway 17. Creator gave our ancestors the responsibility to take care of Mother Earth, all the animals, and all the plants, and all living things. It's important to understand that Native people had learned through thousands of years of adept land. Stewardship is the key role. There's a relationship of people attending land for the benefit of the animals that both they survive with, but also to maintain a healthy ecosystem and environment that depends on itself. The really detailed ecoarcheological work that we're doing provides another line of evidence besides the Native oral traditions to really understand what's going on. Features like this that are intact, that are undisturbed, are very valuable in archaeology. We can take samples from them and see what sorts of activities are associated with each type of feature. It looks a little too irregular on this surface to be intentionally shaped. It's important to us to have this information about how people use plants and animals because that gives the tribe information that they can use to decide how to bring these practices back today. This first stage of our process after we take materials from the field, we sift them into different size classes. There's some really small objects, fish scale, vertebrae, sea urchin spines. What I'm looking for here is actually charred seeds and wood that'll give us a bigger picture as far as what they were eating and things that they were burning. By doing this sort of analysis we can get fairly representative pictures that can inform policy management and Native relationships to the environment that need to be restored because all the historic injustice that's gone, that's happened to those communities. Actually our tribe is working hard to restore our indigenous knowledge. Our Amamutin Land Trust has a stewardship program. We bring in our young adults and they learn of our culture. It's really nice being out here and having this collaboration and especially doing it for our ancestors and knowing that we're not just out here for a check, it's really meaningful. I think it's nice that we're collaborating with them because you can either let them dig up your ancestors' bones or you can work with them. We kind of learn from each other, you know, they probably learn from us, from our Native ways and we're learning from them, from our educational field experience. I like working with Berkeley, Professor Lightfoot and Rob. He shares all of his knowledge, so that's what I love about it and that's what our culture was about. We found a deer vertebrae on the last one. Okay, yeah, Rob told me that. Yeah. We find that houses a lot of our ancestors that could not be more happy than I am with the work of our stewards. They recognize that if our culture is survived, they must be successful in their learning. We've been experimenting with doing x-rays. As we learn how Native people lived on the land and took stewardship responsibility for the land, we learn how to adapt and survive in our own right. If we don't manage the land properly, we won't survive as a people. Okay, I think we're unmuted and good to go again. So, I'm going to, based on the precedents set by that video, kind of displaying some of our collaborative work together, I am going to follow up and talk about a little bit of our research design when working with the Omnibus Land Trust. So, having just a little bit of technical difficulty, I'm going to hop out real quick. My slides are not moving forward. So in the first stage in our research design is, of course, field methods that is guided by a collaborative and indigenous approach to archaeology, rather than coming to the tribe with questions we have, we focus on forging our relationships and seeing what is of interest to the tribe in a given time and place, what kind of questions different tribal members are interested in, and go from there. And that really guides our research strategies. In this case, we're aiming to be minimally invasive and surgically precise in order to avoid sensitive cultural remains like burials and target ecofactual remains that can tell us about past human relationships with the environment. So, we begin by conducting geophysical survey, including ground penetrating radar, magnetometry, electrical resistivity, in order to get subsurface images to potentially avoid disrupting sensitive cultural remains. We then do surface survey where we track the density of artifacts on the surface in a given site to develop densities, but also boundaries to then guide our subservice investigation where initially we do augurs to kind of get a sense of site integrity and depth and materials encountered. We follow that up with opportunistic column sampling. A lot of these areas we work, especially on the coast, there are erosional features within middens where integrity is being compromised, but profiles are exposed of intact archaeological deposits and we will take column samples from those. We do very limited excavation, but in some cases, we'll follow through on excavation with tribal approval and all of this work is, of course, done in concert side by side, you know, at the trial's edge with members of the Almond Woods and Stewardship Corps. Now, once this material comes back to the lab, we carry out bulk sediment to separate heavy and light fraction materials, rocks and lithic technologies and bones and shell from paleo, from ethnobotanical remains like charcoal and charred seeds, and we then conduct a very fine-grained analysis of these remains. We don't take much from the field, but what we do bring back to the lab, we analyze to a very small size fraction. Zoarcheologically, we're looking at things like fish scales, sea urchin spines, fish vertebrae down smaller than two millimeters in some case. It takes a lot of microscope time and, of course, paleoethnobotanical research requires a tremendous amount of microscope time as well. Rob Cuthrill spearheading are much of our sampling strategies looking at vital lifts and starch grains and residues. We also look at lithic technologies to get a sense of trade networks and site use and settlement patterns. Now, a lot of this research conducted by the California Archeology Lab with Rob Cuthrill and Kent Lightfoot at the helm focus on the use of fire by native peoples to manage landscapes. Clearly, in California, wildfires are an issue, especially the large-scale destructive ones we see today that are a result of European suppression of small-scale fire. Prior to European colonization, it becomes pretty apparent to us ethnographically and archaeologically that native people were using prescribed fire to manage the landscape in a way that would promote biodiversity and mitigate the potential for destructive wildfires. It actually created a more biodiverse, mosaic-rich habitat. And while I'm a bit of a pyromaniac myself, I started thinking, if there's extensive land management practices going on in the late Holocene on the central coast of California and on the Lutzen territory, perhaps there are analogous practices happening to manage marine resources. There's a lot of middens filled with shellfish and fish remains and marine mammals. If people are interacting this closely with the landscape and developing sophisticated methods to manage these resources, what are their analogs in the ocean or in intertidal zones? So I came up with a few research questions. First, is there evidence of stewardship of shellfish on the central coast by native peoples? In this case, the Amemutzen travel band. Secondly, is there evidence of seaweed and kelp harvesting practices on the central coast? And finally, how can that eco-archeological data be mobilized to revitalize, skip to head, dormant knowledge of traditional resource management practices by the Amemutzen? A lot of these practices were suppressed by European colonizers, and the connection to the coast was distanced for a lot of Amemutzen tribal members who cite removal during the mission period and the high price of rent today to re-establish connections to the coast. So based on that, I came up with these research questions and tried to follow up. Now the Amemutzen territory stretches from about the same north of Santa Cruz and here to Monterey Bay and Elkhorn Slough and extends way out into the interior. The research that I'm going to be talking about today took place, at least the excavations, took place in this area right here just around Davenport, north of Santa Cruz County. I'm going to hone in on three sites in particular, though we sampled more than this. One of them being CASER7, Sand Hill Bluff, which is a middle Holocene site, one of the oldest sites on the Central Coast that we did extensive research on in the summer of 2016. And another upland site, inland, I should say, CASER14, which is up Creek from CASER7, which I'll also call Sand Hill Bluff in this talk, is a late period or late Holocene site. And then there's another late period, a late Holocene site up here, near Uninoa State Park, right on the coast. So I'm going to use those three areas for a bit of comparative data collection and seeing if we see trends through time. We want to be dichromic, we want to be comparative, that's the light footway, of course. So this right here is an image from Sand Hill Bluff. Now this is a 7,000 year old midden on the Central Coast and not a bad place to work during the summers, especially to take a little dip in the ocean at the end of a hard day of work to clean off, no complaints here. One thing that was very apparent when we came to this site and started doing work is that shellfish were very abundant and perhaps the most abundant constituent in the site and our excavations confirmed this. And so I thought, well, this is the perfect place to conduct such an investigation about shellfish management practices in the past. The number one constituent most abundant by way and density and all metrics effectively was the California muscle, California blue muscle, which is the intertidal species that has a sessile adaptation where they stay rooted in place, don't move around very much once they're rooted in place unless they're ripped up by a storm or plucked by a predator or a person. And due in part to this plant-like adaptation, I thought this is a perfect species to investigate the idea of stewardship because they can be managed for either long-term productivity or short-term efficiency. A lot of people, a lot of archeologists in this area have talked about resource intensification and resource depression, wherein things like shellfish are low rank species that would only be harvested and integrated into diets after large-body prey had become depleted. I don't think we see this exactly in this area. So I'll talk about that a little bit more here. If we were to see an instance of resource depression according to the optimal foraging theory, models in human behavioral ecology, we would expect to see a reduction in the size of muscles through time based on a strategy that's guided for short-term efficiency, for getting the largest individuals out of a population because it's the most efficient way to get a big meat package for minimal energy expenditure. And we'd expect to see the way archeologists model this is either a plucking strategy, removing large ones, or a stripping strategy where an entire beds of muscles are stripped. Now this might seem like a destructive practice, but if we think about the plant analogy and letting a field lay fallow and harvesting it and returning to it at regular intervals, we can see that a system of stewardship could be built up around individual muscle beds. So for that, we would expect to see some stability in size through time. And I set these expectations up here what we might see in the archeological assemblages of muscles, probably a small to medium size of muscles, a relatively narrow range in size, not particularly large, not particularly small. There would likely be a seasonally specific trend to this harvesting practice due to the time required to let a muscle bed lay fallow. There are also a number of animals that live in association with muscle beds like gooseneck barnacles and a few other predatory snails that we'll talk about a little bit later. Whereas with a plucking strategy, which would maybe signal some resource intensification and depression, we'd expect to see a larger size in muscles earlier and a decreased through time probably happening in an sort of annual opportunistic way. And I test these expectations looking at morphometric reconstructions of muscle size, isotopic seasonality assays and the presence and absence of muscle bed associates. In order to reconstruct muscle size through time, we needed a formula because most of the muscles that we find in the archeological record are fragmented and you rarely find complete valves like this one here. Normally you will, the intact non-repetitive elements are going to be the umbos or the beaks which are more mechanically robust than the rest of the muscle valve. So they tend to preserve pretty well and it turns out this measurement right here of umbo thickness correlates to the overall length of the muscle at nearly a 90% R squared value. So you get just about 90% accuracy for reconstructing muscle size from the measurement of this umbo. Well, we had thousands and thousands of umbos and these assemblages. And fortunately I had the assistance of the URAP program at UC Berkeley undergraduate research apprenticeship program spending countless hours over many years measuring those formula to reconstruct your overall size in order to get a sense of change in muscle size through time in these sites. I'm gonna follow you up with a little bit of a data dump right now. At SDR7, our middle Holocene site, we looked at a few different columns and units and these box plots display a slight decrease in muscle size through time. This test on the side with the circles is a Tukey Kramer's honesty significant difference test. If these circles, the way they are right now, they overlap one another, which suggests little statistically significant difference. If they were to be separate, that would suggest a significant trend in the data that represents a difference. So, but we still see a general decrease in size, not much, but maybe from about 80 millimeters to 70 or so. Another Sandhill Bluff SCR7 unit, which is that middle Holocene site, you see a slight decrease in time, not tremendously significant statistically, but at an average of about 80 millimeters. Now that's a pretty large muscle. The tastiest muscles that I've had and that I've heard talked about ethnographically are the kind of small to medium ones about in the four centimeter or 40 millimeter range. Note here, all these radiocarbon assays, all of these units that were chosen for this analysis have stratigraphic integrity and no reversals, which is often a problem with bioturbation on the coast, but not in these cases. Here's another example from SCR7 of relative stability through time, no statistical variable significance in the size, a little bit over six centimeters of pop or 60 millimeters of pop. Now we're gonna switch over to the assemblage from SMA-16, which is that coastal midden up near Onyonouevo, and we see stability in size through time. Smaller though, maybe at around five centimeters or 50 millimeters for muscles harvested from these sites. And for SR-15, which is that inland site to the late Holocene or late period, we see actually an increase in the size of muscles through time going from the lower levels to the upper levels. That is a statistically significant increase. And these muscles are getting carted a couple of miles inland. So their harvest and transport is a significant thought out process. We compare muscle sizes from these sites. We see on the edges, the two late period sites, SMA-216 and SCR-14 are considerably smaller than our middle Holocene site, SCR-7. But the range in size is considerably less than this very wide ranging assemblages from SCR-7. These sites here have evidence that is consistent with our expectations of a stripping practice of removing muscle beds and harvesting small to medium muscles. They go against the notion of resource depression in that we actually can see either stability in their size through time or even an increase. So perhaps people at around the same time they're using fire intensively on the landscape to manage it. Perhaps they're using analogous practices to manage marine resources. Here at SCR-7, we see a kind of gradual decrease in the size through time. So it is possible that in this area, muscles were gradually resource depressed and the average sizes decreased through time. This could be an example of refining, harvesting methods to be more sustainable for long-term practices, learning from previous lessons in the middle Holocene. We also find, as I was mentioning before, mitolous associates like goose neck barnacles and filed dog wrinkles, cute little univalve gastropod pictured down here in the right and the peduncles of goose neck barnacles up in the top left corner and bottom left, these archeological examples are very abundant in the late period sites suggesting that muscle beds are being pulled up in their entirety and the animals associated with them are coming along for the ride. Another line of evidence we use to interrogate this question is stable isotope seasonality reconstructions with the help of Alec Apodaca and Jordan Brown who gave the intro to this talk. Thank you guys so very much for this. And we see a seasonally specific trend of harvesting in kind of the late summer, early fall, especially for SMA 216 and 214. We see a very tight fit with these red and purple lines here of late summer harvesting, a little more of a broad fit with SCR seven, the mid Holocene site, which may suggest that in relation to an ethnographic note about muscle harvesting time coinciding with the ripening of elderberries on the branch, which is a late summer, early fall in our research area that people were harvesting muscles in a seasonally specific way in a long-term sustainable way in a way that coincides with our ideas of resource stewardship and possibly even management. Sure, more research needs to be carried out to further refine this model, but this is the direction we're going based on the tribe's interest in restoring traditional resource management practices of intertidal resources. Speaking of intertidal resources of another type, kelp, it was something that I thought was very interesting. All of these sites that we're looking at are right upon coastlines that are filled with kelp forests, which are one of the most productive marine habitats in the world, incredibly biodiverse. They create habitat for any different animals, for food, for they buffer wave intensity and prevent coastal erosion. They're incredibly productive and they hold a lot of carbon and nitrogen, which makes them really important for climate change and keeping carbon and nitrogen in a sink rather than releasing it. They can be used for fertilizer, they're compounds in them that are medically relevant. They can be eaten, they can be used for biofuels. There's a lot of other uses for them, like thickening agents in soups and cosmetics, they emulsify or I like to rub some on when I'm out in the water in case they're nice and shiny. I can't say enough good things about kelp forests. So I wondered, people living here probably were interacting with these kelp forest ecosystems in some capacity. However, kelp and seaweeds don't really preserve very well in the archeological record. They're brittle and they fall apart. And so I wonder if there was some way we could interrogate that narrative. There are some places where kelp and seaweed have preserved that requires very rare preservation. So despite them really preserving, there are a number of animals, limpids, non-dieteria right along gastropods that live on kelp and seaweeds and seagrasses. So fortunately in our lab, we were already looking at small size fractions based on the work of Gabriel Sanchez and Rob Cuthrill. And so I started looking at smaller size fractions of shellfish remains, which people down below four millimeters because shell gets so pulverized in smaller size classes. However, we found a number of these kelp associated and seagrass associated organisms, especially the seaweed limpid, which is probably my favorite gastropod. That's a high compliment coming from me. These are modern comparative examples of seaweed limpids that I collected down near Davenport. And here are some archeological specimens that came from various assemblages from SCR 714 and SMA 216. As important as kelp is, seagrass is also a tremendously important habitat. A lot of fish lay their eggs upon seagrass and that roast stays there until it hatches. They can be used for a number of different material purposes for cordage and basketry. And they are a protected habitat today. So I wondered, same thing with kelp, are there animals that can provide us proxy evidence for seagrass are staining? Or enough, there are. There's these little little rena snails and lacuna, lacuna vincta live exclusively on the blades of seagrass or phylospatics. And that information was missing from previous research projects that had taken place in this area because of perhaps coarse grain mesh that didn't capture smaller size fractions. And just the time it takes to look for these tiny little things and these smaller fractions is very time intensive. So thanks again to the undergraduate research apprenticeship program. When we compare the size fraction data of these organisms, we see it's pretty clear the numbers that graphs speak for themselves. But when you're looking at smaller fractions, you get a completely different resolution of kelp and seagrass associated gastropods. If you were just looking above four millimeters, you might miss seagrass associates completely. But if you narrow down your resolution, you can provide this indirect evidence of kelp and seagrass harvesting, which is especially exciting for me. And this is kind of a nascent research area that I hope to develop more intriguing methods to poke at this question more. This is kind of the direction that we're going to go in the future. Speaking of the future, what's next? I am currently working with the Almamutsin Land Trust as a consulting archeologist, doing a number of different things, one of them being integrated cultural resource survey, which was developed by Rob Cotthrell, where we do survey of archeological sites, but also mapping of ethnobotanically important plants to overlay that information onto archeological maps so that we can get two sides, identify places of cultural significance for the Almamutsin to do further work at, restoration and propagation of certain plants. I'm also working on a couple archeology and historical ecology projects in Elkhorn Slough and Pescadero Marsh with Alec Apadaca and Gabe Sanchez. As a part of this, we're doing a study on Central California salmonid biogeography. The tribe is especially interested in restoring salmonid populations in some of their creeks and streams and understanding the ancient extent and range on these different species. I'm also working with the tribe helping to consult on their coastal stewardship monitoring programs to apply some of this archeological data to relearning projects for many people who are trying to restore their relationship to the coast. And we're doing this through a grant funded by the Tribal Marine Stewardship Network and that work is underway right now. In order to really do a community outreach component of this research, myself, Gabriel Sanchez, Alec Apadaca, a number of others undergraduates as well have come out and done intertidal tours with the Almamutsin Youth Camp and Stewardship Corps, where we go out, we talk about ocean safety, we get in the water. Here's my main man, Gabe Sanchez, showing off a fishy discot, I believe it was a tide pool sculpin. I'm talking about some kelp to some of the youth camp members. Here's Gabe, after he caught a monkey-faced prickleback. It's maybe not the most comely fish, but pretty tasty, actually, after we cooked her up. In this slide, we're showing new uses, potentially for kelp and seaweed. I don't think this has been done too much, but I think it's a developing method. We call it the jump rope. We're gonna get the double dutch involved next time. We're gonna see. Yeah, there. Hold on, let's do one more, is that right? Give me one more, brother. I'm a party. All right, that's on. Here we are after a day of playing around in the sand, body flipping and just reconnecting with the coast and applying all this archeological research to revitalizing cultural connections to the coast. I have a lot of people to thank, especially the California Archeology Lab at UC Berkeley, Kent Lightfoot, of course, best mentor I could have possibly had. Roberta Dewitt, his lovely bride, who was always there with some wit and witticism. Rob Cuthrell for his just bounteous, endless genius and humility and help along every step of the way. Peter Nelson for showing me the ropes of collaborative archeology up in Costa Miwa country. Gabe Sanchez for helping bring in this wave of coastal-focused research. And of course, my name is Alec Apodaca for helping me with lots of maps and just all kinds of ongoing research. I need to thank the Alma Mootson Land Trust and Tribal Band for allowing me to work with them and continue to develop these programs. Much of this research was funded by the National Science Foundation. And of course we had great collaborative efforts with California State Parks, especially Mark Hilcimer, who gave us the gate keys and led us in and provided us with just a tremendous amount of background knowledge in the area. We weren't able to go out and do our coastal summer camps this summer, unfortunately because of COVID. And so one thing we did was working with the tribe. We developed a digital coastal summer camp and we put together some boxes and sent them out to tribal members and in lieu of doing an in-person intertidal school I created some video footage. I think I've got a few minutes left here. So I'm going to end on a little video I put together that really ties together some of my research, a lot of the tribe interests and kind of directions for where we want to go in the future with restoring these coastal connections. So I'm going to hop off of this and pull up another slide real quick. And then we'll get to the questions right up after this. So kick back, relax and enjoy the ride. About the sea has always pulled us in. Whether we're feeding on its bounty or navigating its waters, human history would be incomplete without tales from the sea. I'm Mike Grung and as an archeologist, I research ancient human relationships on the California coastline. Some of this work focuses on kelp forest resources and their importance to humans through time. So today, we're going to explore some of these underwater wonderland and see what we can learn. Let's dive in and take a closer look. From the shore, we often only see the canopy of kelp forests, the blades and air pockets that bring them to the surface. But when we dive beneath them, we can see how deep and extensive they are. Giant kelps grow up to 150 feet and can grow nearly three feet in a single day. These immense underwater forests provide habitat for a wide diversity of animals. In fact, kelp forests are some of the most biodiverse and productive ecosystems on the planet. Native peoples in California have interacted with and stewarded these resources for thousands of years. Additionally, the rapid growth of kelp makes them a sustainable and renewable resource. Humans use them for a wide range of purposes, including food, fertilizer, and even medicine. They're also very important for regulating our climate, especially in the face of global warming. Kelp and seaweeds produce 70% of the oxygen on this planet and fix and hold a tremendous amount of nitrogen and carbon. Unfortunately, kelps are in trouble. Severe storms, high waves, and rising temperatures have led to the loss of this habitat on our coastlines. Kelps are also being slowly grazed away by a silent predator. In California, the purple sea urchin population has exploded due to the absence of sea otters resulting from historic overhunting. Urchins eat kelp from its base, leaving the rest to float away in a barren sea floor into place. In some areas, divers are removing urchins by hand to give kelp a chance to hold on. Along with the pressure from grazing urchins, kelp refer colder waters and recent spikes in ocean temperature have led to early aging and decay of kelps in some areas. The disappearance of kelp forests on our coastlines is troubling for many reasons. From the loss of the biodiversity and habitat and the destabilization of coastal zones in our global climate. However, not all is lost. Modern scientists and ocean stewards are working tirelessly to better understand this current crisis affecting kelps, combining traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples and modern ecological science to help better understand and steward these precious resources. Alrighty, well, hopefully that was visible to everyone and went smooth. I just wanna say thank you again for your time. I wanna thank my main man Alec Apodaki here for all the maps he helped me with that were presented in this slide. You can see him here in his natural habitat with some elephant seals, his kindred friends. And so long, got any questions? I'll be sticking around for a bit. Thanks so much, Mike. That was great talk. Really a lot of interesting stuff there. And yeah, folks have questions as I imagine they might. Please feel free to put those in the chat. I suppose I have a question of my own just start us off with regard to the collaborations that you're talking about in your video as well. During your talk with like between ecologists and sea stewards and archeologists as well. How do you see those sorts of collaborations evolving in the future? Are there, is there a scope, for example, for doing ecological studies on the sorts of shellfish assemblages that you might gather in the course of some of these stewardship undertakings? That sort of thing. Yeah, I think that's a great question. There's a lot of different directions you can go with that, of course. I think comparing modern assemblages to archeological assemblages, especially when we're thinking about things like sea surface reconstructions. We've talked about this a bit. Sea surface temperature reconstructions and how that affects animals living in them and the people who may want to be reintroducing those animals into their diets. Getting a baseline of things like harmful algebra blooms, influxes of heavy metals, all of these modern issues that face the ocean that perhaps archeological assemblages and ancient assemblages can inform to provide a longer baseline of change. But I think really to the point is this integrative type work where you're looking at deep time scales of ecology and then seeing what modern issues are and how we can potentially use examples from the past that maybe signal stewardship, overlay that with paleo environmental data to kind of see what the conditions were for stewardship. I think it's an interesting, exciting place to be at nexus of a lot of different fields, but certainly interacting with land managers, parks holders, people who have private collections, tribal groups that have their stakeholder interests. I think these endeavors have to be pretty large scale collaborative multi-disciplinary endeavors. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. So we've got a question here from our very own Nico. Who asks, have the recent fires already impacted the coastline where you were working? Was this perhaps the case in the past as well, wildfires and seascapes interacting? That's a great question. Of course, when a fire happens, there's a lot of nutrients that are released in the form of ash that make their way to the streams and make their way to the oceans invariably. And these nutrient loads often result in eutrophication, harmful algae blooms, but also increased nutrients in the water, which can be beneficial in many ways. I was actually just up in the Santa Cruz Mountains doing post burn survey for the past couple of weeks. And I was out in the water a fair amount too, and seeing some of those influxes at various creeks. That's something people have talked about getting a sense of is the impacts of anthropogenic fire in the past on creek sheds and their downstream effects and marine ecosystems, maybe looking for isotopic signatures of an influx of nitrogen or an influx of carbon that might be anomalous to what you would expect to happen naturally in the ocean. But I think our resolution of stable isotope data in marine shells is still not quite that fine grain, maybe some thin sectioning work could be done to get that sort of fine resolution of evasive fires and then their downstream effects. Interesting stuff to think about, but I'm not sure if the attack or the methods are there yet, they'll catch up. Yeah, that is some fascinating stuff, some pretty complex interacting processes there. From our very own Kent Lightfoot in the YouTube chat here, we've got a question, do you think the kelp forests will come back in the near future? And is there any evidence for changes in kelp productivity in the past? That is another excellent question. I think based on the people I've been speaking with, I've been talking with Kelp Watch and a number of different central coasts kelp conservation groups that are thinking about methods for mapping coastlines and kelp extent and seeing how that has changed in the past 10, 20, 30 years using aerial imagery, looking how things like storm events affect kelp die-offs and warming and carbon loading affect kelp die-offs or kelp proliferation. There's some evidence that the warming of the ocean and the increased carbon loads are benefiting certain species of kelp, like macrocystis. On the other, on the flip side, on the North Coast, the benefit is mostly in Southern California, on the North Coast, bull kelp, nereocystis is being adversely affected by warming and carbon loading and also the proliferation of sea urchins. So there are some instances in the present where kelp are doing better and there are other instances where they're getting wholesale wiped out. I think there could be some interesting studies to look at the paleo-environmental effects of things like warming events, extreme storm events in relation to blooms of certain species, abundances of different species in the archeological record to kind of get a multilinear sense of kelp harvest through time. Sort of tricky, because they don't preserve well either in archeological or paleontological deposits, but I think as we enhance our environmental DNA knowledge and ancient DNA tracking that perhaps we could use instances of kelp proliferation in the past and kelp die off to provide a baseline for what's happening now. Of course, we're dealing with a complex system like the ocean and all of these modern influxes and exponential change in pollution and warming, but I've got some hope. I think there's things that are going on right now. There's projects I'm working on that are seeking to do kelp restoration or urchin removal and trying to give them a chance to hold on. Thank you again, that's some amazing stuff to think about. I think we'll end it there. We were running up against the end of our time here and I think that's a great note to hand on as well. These burgeoning collaborations between all sorts of different stakeholders in these processes and trying to do what we can to keep our seascapes healthy. So I'll thank you once again. If anyone wants to view this talk again, it'll be on the YouTube course and I'll see you guys next time.