Brian Timmer

Brian (he/him) is a National Geographic Explorer in the second year of his PhD with Dr. Julia Baum at the University of Victoria, which is supported by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), as well as the Kelp Rescue Initiative and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He is using historical data that he discovered in the University of Victoria archives to investigate how a half-century of climate change has affected seaweed phenology and kelp forest distribution in the Salish Sea, as well as working with the Kelp Rescue Initiative team to advance kelp forest restoration techniques. Brian spent nearly a decade as a SCUBA instructor, where he watched first-hand as all the kelp forests disappeared from his favourite dive sites in the northern Salish Sea. Soon after he completed a BSc in Biology followed by an MSc in Geography, focused on the remote sensing of kelp forests.