Blue carbon ecosystems provide globally significant yet vastly underestimated and impacted ecosystem services to humans, biodiversity and economies. Accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, uneven levels of protection, and infancy in pertinent data and frameworks are all significantly stressing the benefits of coastal ecosystems, necessitating scalable contemporary technologies.    Here, we present the novel coastal ecosystem accounting framework of the Global Seagrass Watch service. Our developed scalable framework blends modern Earth Observation advances with high-quality field data, across multi-national and multi-annual scales. We showcase the scalability and confidence of our framework through its recent applications across both tropical and temperate coastal biomes.    Leveraging our framework, we nationally aggregate high-resolution analysis-ready mosaics using the open Sentinel-2 and PlanetScope image archives. These analysis-ready image pixels are transformed into seagrass extent, condition and blue carbon accounts. Our national seagrass accounts to date cover more than 76,000 km² of extent across around 74,000 km of coastline in 28 countries and 3 seagrass bioregions.   We discuss the real-world impact of our technology on climate change mitigation in a recent blueprint project for the Seychelles. We also articulate current technological challenges, respective solutions, and near-future opportunities and applications of Earth Observation for transparent and effective coastal ecosystem accounting, decision making, financing and resilience—within the 21^st century.

Primary Presenter: Dimosthenis Traganos, German Aerospace Agency (DLR) (dimosthenis.traganos@dlr.de)

Authors:

Alina Blume, ESA  (alina.blume@esa.int)

Spyros Christofilakos, German Aerospace Agency (DLR)  (spyros.christofilakos@dlr.de)

Chengfa Benjamin Lee, German Aerospace Agency (DLR)  (chengfa.lee@dlr.de)

Avi Putri Pertiwi, German Aerospace Agency (DLR)  (avi.pertiwi@dlr.de)