Seagrass Blue Carbon Mapping using Open Sentinel-2 Data and Cloud Computing in support of the Nationally Determined Contributions of The Bahamas

Kurzfassung

Seagrasses are one of the world’s most productive ecosystems, playing an important role in climate change mitigation. They are vast natural carbon sinks which have important, yet largely overlooked and underestimated implications into national climate agendas like the Nationally Determined Contributions of the Paris Agreement. Precise knowledge of spatially-explicit seagrass distribution and country-specific in-situ carbon data is crucial for meticulous seagrass carbon accounting. Within the Global Seagrass Watch project, funded by DLR and supported by the Group on Earth Observations-Google Earth Engine program, we processed 18,881 single images to create a multi-temporal Sentinel-2 composite using the cloud computing platform Google Earth Engine to quantify the seagrass extent and associated carbon stocks for Bahamian waters. Preliminary results yield a seagrass extent larger than the land area of The Bahamas, which can store approximately 1,101 Mt CO2, and sequester 26 times more CO2 than annual CO2 emissions of the Bahamas. Our generated data inventories can help to estimate the economic value of Bahamian seagrass and their blue carbon. This could support interdisciplinary scientific research and management efforts at the intersection of climate change mitigation, MPAs, and biodiversity stock maintenance within The Bahamas and the global climate action context.