Seaweed is one of the best carbon sequestering ecosystems, and BC has immense area for seaweed restoration and carbon sequestration. Unlocking this requires precisely measuring both where seaweed is, and how much of it is there (its biomass). Unfortunately, measuring in the ocean is expensive, time consuming, and difficult. Often the “state of the art” is sending divers to manually count and record what they see. This doesn’t scale to BC’s 26,000 km of coastline.
Coastal Carbon is building AI models that helps satellites “see” underwater to measure and monitor BC’s massive blue carbon ecosystem.
Coastal Carbon is building AI models to see underwater from space (satellites), enabling scalable cost-effective monitoring of seaweeds and other ocean ecosystems. This provides the measurements necessary for better management and protection of those ecosystems, and to measure the carbon they store.
Supported by NorthX, Coastal Carbon has partnered with Coastal First Nations Great Bear Initiative and Ocean Wise to develop and pilot a remote seaweed biomass monitoring solution critical to the restoration and expansion of seaweed carbon sequestration projects along British Columbia’s coastline. AI and remote satellite data will be used to measure seaweed biomass for ecosystem health as well as carbon offset verification.
