Blue carbon ecosystem monitoring using remote sensing reveals wetland restoration pathways

In an era of climate and biodiversity crises, ecosystem rehabilitation is critical to the ongoing wellbeing of humans and the environment. Coastal ecosystem rehabilitation is particularly important, as these ecosystems sequester large quantities of carbon (known in marine ecosystems as “blue carbon”) thereby mitigating climate change effects while also providing ecosystem services and biodiversity benefits. The recent formal accreditation of blue carbon services is producing a proliferation of rehabilitation projects, which must be monitored and quantified over time and space to assess on-ground outcomes. Consequently, remote sensing techniques such as drone surveys, and machine learning techniques such as image classification, are increasingly being employed to monitor wetlands. However, few projects, if any, have tracked blue carbon restoration across temporal and spatial scales at an accuracy that could be used to adequately map species establishment with low-cost methods. This study presents an open-source, user-friendly workflow, using object-based image classification and a random forest classifier in Google Earth Engine, to accurately classify 4 years of multispectral and photogrammetrically derived digital elevation model drone data at a saltmarsh rehabilitation site on the east coast of Australia (Hunter River estuary, NSW). High classification accuracies were achieved, with >90% accuracy at 0.1 m resolution. At the study site, saltmarsh colonised most suitable areas, increasing by 142% and resulting in 56 tonnes of carbon sequestered, within a 4-year period, providing insight into blue carbon regeneration trajectories. Saltmarsh growth patterns were species-specific, influenced by species’ reproductive and dispersal strategies. Our findings suggested that biotic factors and interactions were important in influencing species’ distributions and succession trajectories. This work can help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of restoration planning and monitoring at coastal wetlands and similar ecosystems worldwide, with the potential to apply this approach to other types of remote sensing imagery and to calculate other rehabilitation co-benefits. Importantly, the method can be used to calculate blue carbon habitat creation following tidal restoration of coastal wetlands