OEMC project use case: Soil carbon accounting system for world mangroves
- Creators
- OpenGeoHub Foundation
Description
Mangrove forests are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems in the world with most of the carbon stored in the soil. We built a 30-m spatial resolution data representing soil organic carbon stocks for 0–100 cm depth interval and at bi-annual intervals with uncertainty for mangrove soils for the purpose of the Global Mangrove Alliance. Global Mangrove Alliance is currently coordinated by the following members: Conservation International, The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, The Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International and World Wildlife Fund. Currently, most of GIS data for mangroves are managed by Wetlands International. Predictions of soil carbon can then be used to do accounting and estimate losses and gains in the years to come. OpenGeoHub has already helped produce soil carbon estimates for world mangrove forests, in this use-case we have looked at how to automate the process and make it easy for users to add new point data and help improve predictions.
Stakeholder needs:
- TNC requires estimates of the soil organic carbon (below-ground carbon) i.e. soil organic carbon dynamics for Mangroves to help detect positive and negative trends and estimate SOC stocks for various climate zones / mangrove types (Delta, Estuary, Fringe, Lagoon). These are then used in the Global Mangrove Watch / Restoration project (https://maps.oceanwealth.org/mangrove-restoration/).
- It is important to update annual predictions of SOC stocks as soon as new EO data is available e.g. for 2023, 2024 etc,
Implementation steps include:
- Developed a fully automated procedure based on the scikit-map to update models and produce predictions for new years,
- OpenGeoHub is implementing an automated soil mapping framework (EOsoilmapper) based on Landsat-archive.