Project: Santa Barbara Coastal Long Term Ecological Research site

From http://www.lternet.edu/sites/sbc
The Santa Barbara Coastal LTER is located in the coastal zone of southern California near Santa Barbara. It is bounded by the steep east-west trending Santa Ynez Mountains and coastal plain to the north and the unique Northern Channel Islands archipelago to the south. Santa Barbara Coastal Long-Term Ecological Research (SBC) Project is headquartered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.

The research focus of SBC LTER is on ecological systems at the land-ocean margin. Although there is increasing concern about the impacts of human activities on coastal watersheds and nearshore marine environments, there have been few long-term studies of the linkages among oceanic, reef, sandy beaches, wetland, and upland habitats. SBC LTER is helping to fill this gap by studying the effects of oceanic and coastal watershed influences on kelp forests in the Santa Barbara Channel located off the coast of southern California. The primary research objective of SBC LTER is to investigate the relative importance of land vs. ocean processes in structuring giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) forest ecosystems for different conditions of land use, climate and ocean influences.

SBC LTER Data: The Santa Barbara Coastal (SBC) LTER data are managed by and available directly from the SBC project data site URL shown above.  If there are any datasets listed below, they are data sets that were collected at or near the SBC LTER sampling locations, and funded by NSF OCE as ancillary projects related to the SBC LTER core research themes. See the SBC LTER Data Overview page for access to data and information about data management policies.