A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
kelp forest
A kelp forest is a stand of large brown seaweed growing up from rock in cool shallow coastal water, with a canopy at or near the surface, a midwater layer, and an understory, arranged in the same tiers as a forest on land. Giant kelp can grow up to two feet a day and reach well over a hundred feet. Everything about the structure — the shade, the shelter, the current slowed inside it — creates habitat, and hundreds of species live in one.
Etymology
The word kelp is Middle English and its origin is not established, but its earliest meaning was not the living plant. It named the ash produced by burning seaweed, which was a commodity long before the seaweed itself needed a name in English, and only later did the word slide backward from the product to the plant it came from.
Notes
Kelps are not plants. They are brown algae, with no roots, no vascular system, and no flowers; a holdfast grips rock and takes up nothing, and gas-filled floats lift the blades toward light. The comparison to a forest is nonetheless exact in the way that matters, since the structure creates the community, and removing the canopy changes everything living under it.