By Sonal Gupta, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Canada’s National Observer The kelp forest in the northern Salish Sea was gone before anyone knew how much had been lost. Then Brian Timmer opened a box of 1972 photographs. The photos were part of roughly 14 boxes of field notes, reports and aerial images left behind by the late researcher Alan Austin in the University of Victoria archives. They had been taken to map red algae but also captured another story: a coastline dark with bull kelp near Comox, Denman Island and Cape Lazo. In some places, kelp stretched more than a kilometre offshore and ran for kilometres along the coast. Timmer said the photos matched stories from people who remember fishing above dense kelp beds as children, including one account of…
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